Technical Services

When Disaster Strikes Your PC Hard Disk

Larry Mingione and Eray Ekici

When your computer has hard disk problems, there are several things you can do right away without any help from technical support. The tools you need may have come with Windows95 or 98, or they can be installed from the CD-ROM or disks that came with your operating system.

Prevention

There are ways to prevent a disaster from ever happening. The most important is to back up your files. Any time you install a software application, make a backup of your hard disk first. Of course, backups should be done on a regular basis. But if you only backup once in a while, an installation should be one of those times.

Windows95 comes with a utility called Microsoft Backup. This utility will try to detect a tape drive and stream data to it. It will also work with Iomega drives. The downside is that it will not span tapes or cartridges, and it won't work with 4mm tapes. So you will need a Jaz or 1/4-inch tape drive to use with this utility. Alternately, Iomega has a backup utility called 1-Step that works with their drives and will span Zip disks.

Another tool that comes with Windows95 is the Emergency Recovery Utility. This is not installed with Windows, but it is on the 95 CD-ROM. ERU will not back up any hard drive data, but it will make a backup of registry and system information and copy it to a floppy for later restoration.

ERU should be used before installing anything that will make extensive registry changes such as large programs like Adobe Photoshop or Macromedia Director. When something goes wrong, restoration can be done from the floppy with just one command. It's a good idea to use this utility frequently, because the registry information can easily be corrupted for a variety of reasons. Having a backup like this can enhance your PC peace of mind.

Another thing you can do to prepare for disaster is to make a Windows95 startup floppy. To do this, go to the "Add/Remove Programs" control panel and click on the "Startup Disk" tab at the top, then click "Create Disk." Use a new floppy or one without any needed data, as the disk is re-formatted by this operation. If you do all three of the above operations, you should be well-guarded in case disaster strikes. However, make sure you repeat these steps frequently for up-to-date protection.

Minor Problems

There are several things you can do to maintain a healthy hard drive and keep annoying problems from cropping up. Some solutions are available from Microsoft, and some are from other vendors.

Install virus protection software. There are many good ones available, like Mcafee's VirusScan and Command Software's F-Prot Professional, which are both used in the ACF labs. Whichever one you choose, make sure you can get updated virus definition files easily, and make sure you install the updates regularly. There are many macro viruses around which can be transferred to your computer via a word processing document macro stored within a file. A good virus protection program can be set up to automatically check files on floppies and disinfect them if necessary.

ScanDisk and Defrag are two Windows95 utilities that should be used at least once a week. ScanDisk can check for physical errors on your hard disk and on the directory structure. Defrag can optimize the stored files on your disk so they can be found, and hence launched, faster. To run these utilities, go to your start menu and select "Programs" and then "System Tools."

A good third-party utility is Norton Utilities. This can take the place of ScanDisk and Defrag, while also providing limited virus protection and many other goodies. Plus, it will update itself automatically over the Internet. Norton also automatically and periodically checks the state of your hard disk, and informs you when there are problems.

Major Problems

The worst that could happen is if either "OS Missing" or "No Bootable Partition Found" displays when you turn on your machine. In either case, your machine can't boot up from your hard drive as it usually does, so you'll have to start up from an external floppy disk. If you did not make a Windows95 startup floppy as was recommended above, you can have someone with a functioning PC make one for you to use.

"OS Missing" means that something has happened to the Windows startup or operating system files. In this case, you should use the Emergency Recovery Utility disk you so diligently created the day before this tragedy occurred. First, reboot the machine from the bootable Windows95 startup floppy, then insert the ERU disk. At the DOS prompt, type in "ERD" to begin the process of recovering your old system files.

"No Bootable Partition Found" means that you may have a major disk hardware problem. Your computer may have forgotten its configuration settings, or there may be physical damage to your hard disk . In this case, there are two things you can try. Test to see if there is a startup partition. Boot with the Windows95 startup floppy and try to invoke the C drive (or whatever letter you assigned to the startup partition) by typing "c:" at the a:> prompt.

If you get the error message "Invalid Drive Specification," you can try booting up with the Windows95 bootable floppy and run ScanDisk from there. If you have Norton Utilities, it comes with an Emergency Startup Disk that can check all sorts of things for you.

If your machine has lost the information about its drive specifications, it will have to be reminded of them. If your machine is older, the information in the CMOS (a special area of memory reserved for system hardware information) may have been lost. Older machines need to have this information entered manually; newer machines autodetect the information. Getting to the CMOS information means rebooting your machine and holding down some command key or sequence (usually F1 or F10, but check your machine's manual) to activate the CMOS setup program stored in memory.

After completing the next steps, you will have to save any changes you made to the CMOS, so be careful not to change anything in the CMOS setup if you're not sure about it.

The CMOS program usually presents the system information in pages. The Hard Disk information should be on the first page. The settings can be easy to configure if your machine is relatively new; all it requires is that Hard Disk 0 be set to "AUTOCONFIG." If your machine is older, you may have to insert several parameters, such as Heads (Hds), Cylinders (Cln), Sectors (Sec) and Leaving (Lf).

Unfortunately, the correct parameters to enter, in this case, are usually printed on the top of the hard disk itself, so you would have to open the case on your machine to read them. But if you open it, do so with caution.

Warning!

PLEASE don't open the case if you are at all unsure of what you're doing. You don't want to injure yourself by exposing yourself to the electric current in the components inside the PC. We recommend, at this point, calling a qualified technician that can repair it for you.

If you were able to reset the CMOS parameters yourself, rebooting the PC should revive your machine entirely. This is because loss of CMOS information does not mean loss of information on the hard disk. The PC should recognize the boot partition and restart normally. If not, have a qualified technician look at the PC to determine the problem.

These major problems seem to be the exception rather than the rule for problems with your PC's hard disk. Aside from these situations, there are relatively cheap and easy things you can do to diagnose and fix hard disk problems on your PC. [ C ]

Larry Mingione and Eray Ekici are network engineers at ACF.
larry.mingione@nyu.edu
eray.ekici@nyu.edu

Posted October 5,1998