As you said, give the drive a bit of a health check, but not booting from cd when the harddrive has a partition is normal on dells; regardless of where it is in the boot order. One slightly dodgy hack to get around this is to disconnect the ide cable from the drive whilst leaving it in the motherboard, turn the machine on, start the boot from cd process and simply plug ide back into the drive. Obviously leave power connected. In a pinch, this always seems to work, although I don't like doing it with ide drives thatmuch over sata ones. Getting a raid card for something that old is pointless. All the cheap raid cards use the cpu and a p4 is going to see a performance hit if you do software raid. You can get more expencive ones where this won't happen, but they would cost much more than the system is worth. Why don't you just order a new drive for it, image the current drive onto it and then purchase a 2.5 usb drive for the user? They could be instructed to plug it in every week or so and you could use something like syncback to handle backups. Having said this, if there still on an 80 gig, they obviously don't have overly huge storage requirements, so perhaps an automated cloud service would work better. On 03/12/2010, David Mehler <dave.mehler@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello Everyone,
First of all my thanks to everyone who offered suggestions on this issue. I do not have a separate box here to put the drive in nor do I have my USB drive converter I have both of these items 200 miles away, taking the box back with me was/probably still is an option.
I downloaded spinwrite and grml. I did not however get to use any, this gets weird and in all my time working with computers I've not seen this one. Here goes. First of all the box will not boot from CD, probably bios. I started it with no media in the drive and got that black screen with the cursor thingy in the top left corner. Five minutes later, and I did this again and timed it, it booted in to xp. I have no idea why this is happening. I'm going to run memtest on this box ram bank by ram bank, my first question though any ideas as to why this delay, it sounds to me something hardware, like the system is trying to talk to something that is either failing, has failed, or isn't responding. In windows i checked device manager, all looks good no failed devices and the like. This is an xp home box, i'd like to back it up, i've got an external terrabyte drive, does anyone know a free accessible backup option? I'm also looking for a hardware raid card recommendation, i'm going to provide another hard disk of equivalent size i want to set up raid 1 mirroring.
Thanks. Dave.
On 12/2/10, John G. Heim <jheim@math.wisc.edu> wrote:
I usually use grml but I've heard good things about vinux. I have tried vinus and it worked fine. But it comes up in a GUI and I prefer CLI.
grml: http://www.grml.org/ vinux: http://vinux.org.uk/
---- Original Message ----- From: "David Mehler" <dave.mehler@gmail.com> To: "blind-sysadmins" <blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org> Sent: Thursday, December 02, 2010 8:47 AM Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] troubleshooting and linux live CD repair andrecovery
Hello Everyone,
I've got a problem and there's some urgency with it. I've got a pc, it's an older dell p4 2.4 ghz I think running xp home. It's no longer booting. It was working fine yesterday afternoon and was powered down. On next power up last night there were no errors on the screen, but the box didn't boot the only thing was a cursor thingy at the top left of the screen.
I checked cables, they're all in tight, checked the primary drive I am 50 50 on whether it's getting power it feels like it might be, but i'm not 100% certain. I unplugged it's drive cable and restarted the box it complained immediately that the primary master had been removed. I plugged it back in and said error went away, but no other errors came up indicating that the system detected another issue with the drive.
Two reasons i'm very worried about this drive are: 1 I don't think it's been backed up and there's files that are only on this drive, and 2 I don't have another internal hard disk to use with the box.
I do have an external ntfs formatted terrabyte drive USB that I can use. Last time I looked there were not any speech accessible windows live CD options that were out there, has this changed? If not, a Linux option would be welcome. I need to get speech then find out if the drive is responding and possibly repair it, a suggestion was made that the mbr could have got corrupted, I do not see how but I don't have any other ideas.
Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks. Dave.
_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins
_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins
_______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org http://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins