Thinkpads Forum

Was working fine the other day, tried to boot up today, but it won't. tried to boot from cd and it can't, tried to re install win 98, but it can't because it beleives there is no hard drive.

any ideas? -

Thank

James

Could be a trashed hard drive but you can get weird and wonderful problems with the 600 series when the CMOS battery goes out. Did you try re-setting the BIOS?

This is classic hard drive failure. Maybe you are lucky. Check the following:

1. Open the hard drive compartment and reseat the drive. Pull it out and reinsert.

2. Plug in the AC adapter and see if the extra power will start the drive.

If your problem was #1, nothing to worry about. If it was #2, think seriously about replacing the drive; it's gonna fail soon. If neither work, your drive is probably dead (sorry!)

How would i go about re setting the bios or checking the CMOS battery?

is it possible to retrieve some of the information from the drive at all? i have some documents that i could do with asap?

any suggestions welcome

Thanks

James Calvert wrote:How would i go about re setting the bios or checking the CMOS battery?

Hardware Maintenance Manual:

http://www-3.ibm.com/pc/support/site.ws ... WIK-3SYPX2

James Calvert wrote:is it possible to retrieve some of the information from the drive at all? i have some documents that i could do with asap?

In case that the hard drive is physically damaged, but you're in desperate need of the data it holds and are willing to spend a reasonable amount of money on it, you could contact a data recovery specialist. It's simply amazing what these experts are able to achieve even with severely impacted hardware:

http://storage.itworld.com/4650/IDG0112 ... age_1.html

http://www.datarecovery-europe.com/data ... ftware.htm

http://www.datarecovery-europe.com/videos.htm

http://www.datarecovery-europe.com/pres ... alerie.htm

http://www.datarecovery-europe.com/audio.htm

If your hard drive has not failed completely yet, however, but its contents became somehow corrupted, you could try to hook it up to your desktop computer and recover the data with the appropriate software.

I've been using the Ontrack Easy Recovery package and its predecessor Tiramisu for years now and always had incredible results with it, but it isn't cheap:

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoveryprofessional/

http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecoverylite/

There are some trial versions available that you could download just in order to get an idea whether this software is actually capable of restoring any data from your particular drive.

And then there's still the completely free "PC Inspector File Recovery" from Convar, also worth a try, but be aware that it is much inferior to Easy Recovery in most cases:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm

Good luck!