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March 02, 2007

Comments

Iggy

The only quick thought that comes to mind is this. Have you tried putting that drive into another pc as a slave? If luck is on your side this would at least help you to maybe access the data you want to get off the hard drive. My opinion is always - once you have the data it's all good. Yes it's a hassle to have to do reinstalls and drop data back into place. But once the offending drive is clear it's KillDisk I'm your master do as I say time.

Gregg Seelhoff

>Anybody have any experience with any of these problems?

Unfortunately, yes. :)

As far as the hard drive is concerned, (if it were me) I would pull it and install a brand new one, reinstall everything, and then (once it is working) set up the old drive as a secondary drive and see what, if anything, can be recovered. If you reformat it instead, there is no chance to save anything there, and the drive may turn out to be garbage (i.e., unreliable) anyway. Of course, I keep an extra drive or two around for just such an occasion. :)

On the wireless network problem, I would try just buying a USB wireless network card ($40 or so), disabling the onboard cards, and go from there. When Vista refused to recognize my internal network card, I got a Netgear WG111T (to match my Netgear router) and it worked without a hitch, and also doubles as a hand warmer on these cold winter days. :)

Just one opinion...

Ian Tyrrell

I had a problem with dialup not working due to a conflict with Skype. It took me months to figure it out.

If you've got skype on the computer try turning it off (or goto the Skype options->connections and turn off using port 80 and 443).

Leroy

You might want to try out Spinrite to recover the hard drive.

As for the IP address problem I assume you aren't using any static IP addresses and that your wireless router is running dhcp and that you are not relying on Window Automatic Addressing. If you are using DHCP from the wireless I would try manually releasing ipconfig /release and ipconfig /renew on both machines to see what addresses they are getting. If that doesn't fix it I try restarting the router, then setting it back to factory defaults and then reconfiguring it.

Tom

Thanks for the advice, everyone.

I'd read about making the drive a slave drive. The problem with that is that I am a software person - I don't have the slightest idea how one would go about taking out the hard drive and hooking it up to another machine.

If I can't figure out a solution by Monday, I'm going to call up some computer repair place in town and see if they can do anything.

Iggy

This is actually not all that hard. I'll try and walk you through it here. Before anything look at the hard drive. On the side you should see a tiny pin that is in place. Look at the bottom of the drive. You should see some markings that denote master and slave. Remove the pin and place it in the slave slot. Now open the case. You should see an IDE cable - flat cable that gets in the way or SATA cable if your machine is newer - cable that is thin and doesn't get in the way. This will lead to your hard drive from the motherboard. In the case of most IDE cables you should see an unused connection on the cable. This is what you would plug into the extra hard drive. Keep in mind some computer cases make it hard to allow for a second drive. The unused portion of the cable would plug into the proper place on the hard drive. You will also need to make sure your power supply has a plug for this device. Look at your current hard drive to see what type of plug it is using from the power supply. Look for a similar unused plug and plug this into the proper place on the drive. If everything has gone smoothly and your bios sees the drive as a slave you should be all good. Boot your computer and then look for the new drive letter that correlates to the slave drive. The only problem you might run into is Windows not wanting to allow you access to some of your data on the drive. In most cases however you should be able to back up email and other files with no problem.

The other thing that could be tried. Is to place the hard drive in an external enclosure and connect the drive using a USB or a Firewire port. External enclosures aren't to expensive. This should in theory work the same as if you had set the hard drive up as a slave within the case.

Keep in mind that some computers such as a name brand pc. May in fact have very limited number of power supply connectors. If you bought a bargain unit. The power supply may struggle to handle any new device that was been added.

Jim Lawless

If you need to get dialup working on the laptop as a short-term fix, I'd recommend using the command-line dialer rasdial.exe.

Type rasdial from a cmd prompt to see the options.


lyssa

Do you think that your computer that keeps customers data and emails might have been a target for hackers to try and steal some information?

Tom

No, we have a firewall and the computer connects via dialup. There is nothing that hackers would be interested in - we store no credit card data, our payment processor handles all that sort of thing.

I'm not convinced that even a virus had anything to do with this - the improper shutdown can be enough to do this sometimes with Windows.

Jim Eastman

Tom,
I recently experienced a "crash" with my PC, and found the answer to recovering the HD data using an Adaptec HardDrive enclosure kit:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/_eol/consstor/enclosures/ACS-100NK/index.htm

The drive needs to be set as "Master" and everything on it can be read on another PC.

Hope this helps.

Jim

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