Resolved Yikes! Almost another scary HD failure

I went to a website to look at electronic circuits that dealt with RF sniffing and all of a sudden the mouse pointer started doing the spin wheel, and it wouldn't end---but i could move the mouse around but nothing was clickable.

So after 1 minute I hit the reset button, but after the BIOS dump, it couldnt find the hard drive YIKES!! Put in the recovery DVD and on boot up, repair didn't work and all I got was a screen saying /boot/bcd with a 0xC000F

Did the reboot with the recovery disk a couple more times and finally the machine did boot normally. I was looking at a website that suggested doing the diskpart command and then bootrec/ fixmbr and bootrec/fixboot.

luckily i was spared that and I do have an disk image stashed

After rebooting normally, I ran SeaTools but it found nothing.. I've come to the conclusion, that if your machine hangs for some reason, avoid doing a reset cuz it seems to screw up the hard drive. (Also, image, image, image your machine)

Regards everybody

 

Actually, that has always been the case. Sudden reboots, freezes and shutdowns have never been good for drives as it leaves opened files open and can corrupt critical system files - with the worse case being an unbootable computer! Resetting should always be a last resort. This is why sudden power outages can be so bad too.

It is typically best to try Task Manager first to see if you can terminate the browser sessions. There is a good chance that would have cleared the hung state. Then you could have done a "graceful" reboot to reset all the necessary hooks and settings, including the mouse drivers. You can navigate Task Manager with your Tab and arrow keys - assuming the keyboard still worked. Also, if the keyboard worked, you can navigate to the Restart button in the start menu. This may result is lost work if you were editing a Word document, for example. But critical system files would likely be just fine.

Of course, if both the keyboard and mouse are hung-up, that pretty much leaves the Reset button. But just walking away for 10 minutes is often all Windows needs to detect a problem and work its way through the hung process on its own - without losing any other work or open documents you might have been working on at the time.

That was smart. I usually run chkdsk /r but SeaTools is an effective diagnostics tool too.

Time to make sure you have a good backup.

 

Agree, I should've walked away for 10 minutes. It could have made a difference. But task man wasn't responding either

The one thing that bothers me is this is the second time I've had a HD issue (Resolved - Win 7 crash!! Is it the Hard Drive?)

Right after a successful reboot, last night, I did an image (two diffs on two different external drives)

Regards

 

Or not. You never know.

I am starting to think the makers put really cheap drives inside those external drives - not to mention, USB itself just isn't a reliable interface, IMO. The forums seem inundated with users like you who have had many problems with these USB external drives. Yet I know of several folks who use "enclosures" (where you install your own drive) that use the eSATA interface, and they have been running flawlessly for years.