I powered up my desktop today, and all that happened was an acrid cloud of smoke was discharged from the power supply...

Im in the middle of doing some sheetrock and insulation work on mi casa so this release of magic smoke couldnt happen at a worse time..Anyway off to to obtain a new power supply..

The pc boots till it tells me disk boot failure or something.....

anyway Im going to build a pc tomorrow and see if I can salvage anything off the old hard drive....

BTW this message brought you via Panasonic Toughbook

Definite East Coast term. I'm a Westbury, NY transplant to the midwest. They've never heard of "sheetrock." Thanks for the NY-ism.

Paul

So what do they call it then?

gyprock?

drywall?

gypsum board?

any idea how effed the HD on the pc I let the smoke out of is?

I'm from upstate NY and I know what sheetrock is.
Being a "computer guy" if the smoke did indeed come from your hard drive. You have little chance of making it work again. There are places that can recover stuff off if it even after is broken. I think they charge somewhere between $300 and $1000.

NO the smoke didn come out of the hard drive..... the smoke came out of the power supply

I removed it from the pc and took it apart and there are " burnt things" in the power supply,

so I bought another one, hooked it up.. and nada.......

the files are on the drive I can see them in DOS....

what voodoo do I have to do to get the drive to boot the OS again?

The best thing at this point is to get a new hard drive. Install a new OS on it and get it up and running. Then install the old HD as a slave. You should be able to read it and recover your data. If you are talented, you can copy over some old folders and recover many of your bookmarks and so on.

What might have happened is the old power supply went a little haywire and spiked the voltage in the system and may have damaged the drive.

the power supply "functioned" (ironic) as it should..

the other components should be intact.. in theory
you're probably seeing burnt capacitors or resistors who sacrificed their life for the good of the other components...

never skimp on a PSU

worst case scenario... plug in the old stuff, if they dont work, they dont work..

I agree, get a new hard drive, build on that.
After its all done, put the old one in as a slave, and copy everything over, fast.
You may get several attempts, but if it is on the way out, get it done when you see it the first time.

If you can see it in DOS, you can use DOS to copy everything if needed.

Do xcopy /?

If you are stuck, I can help over the phone to get you back online again.
email me from here to get my attention, I will call you right back.
Rich

When a power supply goes, there is a very good possiblity that the power rails can short out and put 120v into your system, if only for a split second. that's enough to fry everything. I've had a computer die that way, and my buddy's power supply on a brand new computer he just built blew up and fried everything on the first boot. yeah, never skimp on a PSU.

sorry dude. try putting the disk in an external enclosure.

Oh sorry - I see. So it seems as if your hard drive is working and there's a problem with windows. Here's what I would do.
Go buy a cheap hard drive and install windows on it from scrath so it boots up. Put your other hard drive that won't boot in your computer with the one you just made and copy all the files you care about off of it. From now on save a copy of all your important files on both hard drives so you never lose anything in the case of a drive failure.
or
Take your hard drive over to a friends house who has a working computer and have them put your hard drive into their computer and burn a CD with all your important files. Go home and re-install windows on your bad hard drive and put all your files back in place.

There might be an easy solution to this that some windows admin might know about like some kind of boot to safe mode something or other or changing some boot settings.

with all of the above. Sure, there are ways to get windows up and running again on the drive that currently won't boot, but if don't want to take any chances with the data on the drive, just buy a new drive, install windows, and then bring your toasted drive up as a slave and then copy the data over to the new drive.

Where I work a doctor accidently nocked her laptop to the floor right after she had told me she had 21 gigs of data- all of her life's work including documents that were soon to be published. When the laptop hit the ground, the computer wouldn't boot and the drive sounded like it contained gravel. Out of her 21 GB of data, I was able to recover 3 GB, which didn't include her most recent and almost finished research. (Not to mention her PowerPoint files for a presentation that she was flying to NY this weekend to give.)

Back yer stuff up people!!

yup to all of the above. Power supply going out can put garbage on the bus that will take out other components. Most likely on the drive it is either the controller died or you got a head crash. If head crash a lot of the data is recoverable easily. If the controller died and you can find an identical one then they can be swapped out by a really good geek. Other than that it is a very expensive trip to the white room.

Like Robert said - backup is good! External hard drives are cheap as all get out and there are brain dead backup softwares (often supplied with the drive) that takes 0 effort to make work. Do it or some day you will be sad.

Ummmm,

You could do to DOS,
create a new folder named "NewWindowsFolder",
Reboot your system with your Win install disk,
and install XP or W2K, whatever you've got, into the temporary install folder.

This will allow Win to be installed without reformatting your HDD.

Then you get the joy of figuring out how to get your programs to function properly. with your new registry.

I have an external hard drive that I back up data too, and store pics etc. all the programs are on the "c" drive.... though I only back up pnced a week or so... unfortunately I had a bunch of programs on the c drive that I wont be able to replace

Im in the middle of re-insulating, and sheetrocking my living room, so the pc isnt the top priority

the joys of living in a circa 1910 oyster shack... a summer house converted to year round living

OK between taping joints and applying joint compound. I got another HD installed it in my pc, then loaded Windows XP....

Then I tried to install the old drive as a slave. Ive tried setting the jumpers according to Western Digitals instructions (both drives are WD, the new 160 Gig, the old 20 Gig).. The machine wont boot with the old drive as a slave....

I notice besides the master and slave option, there is a cable select option..

Do I have to change any bios settings? I was going to start messin in the bios, but had to leave for work

leave the seconde HD set up as it was (master i presume) and connect it to the second IDE bus ...

might have to disconnect your CD-ROM/DVD if it's using that bus ...
Andy

I took the old hd out of the machine, installed the new hd in the same spot as the old hd (end of the ribbon cable) Was able to install a copy of XP. Then I tried the old hd in the slave position.... and no boot..


This pc does have two cd/dvd drives.. so I can remove one of them.

Cable select is for weird cables used by such folk as Dell, wherein the cable determines the setting. Very unusual. If your old drive was set for cable select then that must be kept, otherwise you cannot use it.

On one cable, one drive must be the master, the other must be the slave. If only one drive is present it might be set as master, or not set for any option it depends on the drive specification.

If the bad drive does not allow the computer to boot when configured as a slave, then try as Andy suggests. If it still does not want to boot, then it is pretty much toast. It might be worth extra effort if it had valuable data on it, but to try to save a program is unlikely to be worthwhile. The problem is that the registry would also need to be recovered, and essentially the whole of the OS along with that. About the only real way to try to recover it would be to find an identical drive, and swap the platters.

I did this on my old computer a while ago and all I needed to do was install the new drive in the master possision and boot with the disk that came with my computer to restore the opperating system. Then I installed the old drive in the second possision with the pins set to slave and I was able to access the D drive but not the C drive. I had it partitioned and it appears the C drive was smoked but the D could still be accesed. I didn't know enough about dos to try to even touch the C any more. Even then I was only able to save about 80% of the D drive.

This was all caused by my back up battery failing and a power spike!

I think you are more than half way there. Past the hard part.
Have you gotten your PC to boot with your new 160GB drive in there alone?

Try different jumper settings. Try switching the plugs on the ribbon cable between the two drives. See if you can verify that the jumper configurations are indeed the same between the two western digiatl drives meaning the configuration for master on your new drive doesn't equate to cable select on your old drive. You're assuming they're both the same. I doubt a manufacturer would change but I don't know for sure.

Even if your original drive is bad, your machine should still boot up with the good new drive. If it has the OS installed and it can read the drive, it shouldn't not boot because there is some unnecesary hardware component that is failing.

After hooking up both drives, go into your BIOS and make sure that the problem drive is being recognized correctly.

I think its time to give the old drive the float test

bios recognizes both drives, yet the old drive doesnt spin up when power is turned on..... it did spin the other day..

try setting the boot order to Drive 0 (new) cdrom then Drive 1(old)

Outwest Sheetrock is the wallboard and Drywall is the entire operation of wall finishing.