Well, there was a brief (under 5 seconds) power outage here Sunday evening and it caused my computer to reboot while I was using it.....and upon reboot, it wouldn't. Just keeps giving me an error message and continually reboots itself.....won't allow me to do a restore function (Norton GoBack) either, keeps crashing/rebooting midway through.

Anyone know of a place local to me (Lynnwood/Everett/Mountlake Terrace/etc) that does good recovery/repair that won't charge me an arm & a leg or take 10-15 days ala Best Buy Geek Squad? I am fairly sure the hard drive is toast but I want to recover as much as possible since my backup external hard drive is still in storage & hasn't been updated since before I moved here in May......

Any help would be greatly appreciated........good thing there are 2 computers here right now and the second one was turned off when this happened.

 

They're not local, but they're good, quick, and one of the cheapest places out there for data recovery.

http://www.gillware.com

Are you sure you need this though? Sure it's not just a corrupt file or something?

 

Whats the error message? If the HDD drive is toast normally it will not just continuelly restart, it will say something about not being able to to boot, and insert something that will allow it to boot, then sit there and wait.

How far exactly is it making it?

 

Boot from windows CD and select "repair" option. If you have one of the system files corrupted, this stands a good chance of fixing it.

 

Hey Darrin, just happens that is my profession

It is a desktop, not a laptop right? I would first try clearing the CMOS. You can do this either by taking the battery on the motherboard out for like 15 second, or there is a jumper close to the battery that you short for ~5 second to clear it. If you have your motherboard manual, or can find it online, refer to that. 95% of the time your data is recoverable. I am not going to be in town until 19-20, so if that doesn't fix it, might try taking it to a place. Don't have them charge you more than $150 though, as it should not take more than 2 hours unless a complete reinstall is necessary (highly unlikely).

 

what he said.

Also, try booting in safe mode.

Is it always crashing at the same point in the reboot? If so, that supports the corrupt file theory. It might be time to reinstall the os.

 

The repair option isn't very user friendly.. Darrin I will send you a PM.

 

Yeah, I think we've got quite a few IT guys on the forum... there's plenty of help available.

 

Darrin i sent you a pm

 

Thanks for the responses guys & sorry for being slow to respond but my time/access to this computer is limited.......ok, here is the deal:

Yes it is a desktop.........Initially the computer died/rebooted from the power outage........it got to the sign on screen, then as I began to sign on, it rebooted. Did that 3-5 times more, then it showed an error screen from Norton "GoBack" that it rebooted the 'puter cuz of possible problems on the HDD. Said restarting the computer would help. So I did and it didn't........came up with the option to start in "safe mode" and tried that.....rebooted at the sign on screen every time as well. I tried stopping the reboot and using the "restore" function of GoBack......it would offer me several points to choose from and said that it may take a couple of tries to get it done right. Tried numerous times/different restore points and at first it would go through it all and reboot after the restore.....only to reboot prior to the sign on screen again. Now it reboots midway through the restore process and sometimes prior to that.......Now it starts scrolling all kinds of DOS-like text up the screen prior to OR during the restore attempt and then reboots after 10 seconds or so.

I found a device from an IT guy here that will allow me to plug in my HDD to a USB port on another computer to see if the drive is cooked or if I can retrieve any/all of the info on it.......but the order comes from flippin China so it will be a few days. This is the device:

http://www.usbgeek.com/prod_detail.php?prod_id=0190

Meanwhile, ALL my software/recovery disks are in storage in one of a billion or so boxes so I am gonna have to either find a damn place to live ASAP or spend a day or two tearing through my 10x20 stoarage unit full of boxes and crap.

I will try taking the battery out of the mother board and see what happens........can't be any worse then what I have already tried.......

Does this answer the questions you guys had? If not I will check back later and see what I can see........also, if anyone has another suggestion/s I am all ears.

I will respond to PMs later when I get another chance to get online. Thanks for all the help guys.

 

That sounds like a curropt Windows File more then anything else. The USB box should work for ya. Do you have full access to another computer?

 

I have access to another one, but it is in limited times....the owner needs it for work stuff so I get it in bits & pieces..........

I HAVE to clean out/empty those storage units, I miss my stuff and NEED some of it now.

Anyone know of a good sized home in this area for rent?

 

You can get USB enclosures local at Circuit City or pretty much any place that make an IDE drive into USB 2.0. Cost about $30 if downtime is of your concern.

 

I was thinking about that.........I am gonna head over in a bit and check those out......I just really liked this one I saw last night (the link) and so I will prolly get both as this one I want to order also does laptop HDD's and CD/DVD drives and pretty much ANY IDE drive out there as well.

Cross your fingers for me.

So what does everyone use/do for backups for their systems? I need input since I am making some changes after all this.

 

Your motherboard/BIOS are likely fine if you get to windows boot. You do need a Windows OS CD to do proper recovery or, in a worst case, re-install. The harddrive is probably OK, but when you get your stuff working run scandisc or whatever you have from norton to check the drive for errors.

EDIT: I would imagine that Norton "GoBack" does not work well in your case because

A. the corrupted file has protection level that makes it inaccessible.
B. the file resides in a bad sector

P.S. PM me if you "cannot find" your windows CD

 

For home backup my company uses NTI Backup NOW! 4.0, and for our business client servers we use UltraBac 8.0, which is pretty much the best out there.

 

I recall seeing something about "possible corruption" in one of the many error messages I have gotten.........I will do a full diagnostic if/when i get her up & running again. And I will let ya know if I can't find my recovery discs......

As for GoBack, I didn't install it, it came on the puter and I am not impressed with it.
Do those allow you to just plug the info back in to a new (or repaired) HDD or do they just copy the info? Usually I just keep a copy of my important info on a spare external drive or something....but that doesn't keep my settings/Outlook info/etc

 

I am more familiar with UltraBac, and it performs File Backup and System State backups, which allow you to just restore everything. Also, UltraBac has an Image Backup agent, which basically makes an image of the entire drive. We have been testing this agent getting ready to sell to our customers, and just this last weekend we finally got to test the restore. You put the bootable CD in and chose the backup to restore, and 35 minutes later we had an entire duplicate server of the one we made the backup of! Don't know if that would fit into your budget though. You may want to look into getting a RAID 1 setup (mirroring).

 

If the computer is new enough a Raid 1 setup w/ a pair of SATA drives is probably cheaper then most of the good backup software out there.

 

Make sure all your fans are working too... I had that happening to me because the proc was overheating and so was the memory controller