Adventures in Data Recovery 5

Last week, I described how the Family Computer went squirrelly.

Yesterday, I finally browbeat Second Son into bringing down one of the spare monitors from the attic and set about seeing what I could recover.

The problem was not as bad as I feared. You can read about it below the fold.

I grabbed an old keyboard from the attic, blew it clean with compressed air, and set the box up on a little table in the kitchen.

I then booted it to the error message:

What’s screwy about this is that it’s telling me that the second hard drive, “Hard Drive 1” is not found. “Hard Drive 1” is actually Hard Drive 2 in people-talk. “Hard Drive 0,” in computerese, is the first hard drive. (For you prisoners of Windows, Hard Drive 0 is where you C:\ Drive is located.)

I flashed the BIOS to the current version, but still got the error.

There is only one hard drive in this box. Where it got the notion that there were two, I haven’t figured out yet:

I went into the BIOS and turned off Hard Drive 1.

The computer booted right into XP without a problem. I copied the data files I wanted to save over the network to the new Windows box, then I loaded Knoppix on the box to test the network card (when I first bought the computer, I was going to make it my webserver, but it was too new–the Linux kernel did not yet have support for the network card).

I did have to pass the horizontal and vertical sync settings for the monitor to Knoppix on boot–it’s an old monitor and the new Knoppix needed help to make it work.

(Knoppix is a “Live CD” Linux distro. That is, you can boot to the CD and it creates a complete Linux environment in RAM without touching your hard drive. However, it is capable of seeing your hard drive(s) and is very popular among network admins for retrieving data off computers where Windows has rolled over and played dead.)

I’m going to play with this box for a little bit and mess around with some other Linux distros. Then I might slap Slackware on it and turn it into my webserver, since it is substantially brawnier than the one I’m using now.

Right now, I’m downloading Open SuSE.

I was going to try Debian, since Knoppix, which is really sweet, is based on Debian, but Debian was just to big for me to download today: 21 CD’s or 3 DVD’s.