When attempting to start my 2005 Dell desktop computer the following message appears: “Disk read error occurred. Use Control/Alt/Delete”. However, pressing Control Alt Delete does not clear the error and instead it reappears. A friend managed to (somehow) get into the computer far enough to produce a different message: “ofoo error code 3314. Use Control/Alt/Delete”. However, upon pressing Control Alt Delete the message repeats again! Can you assist in resolving this problem? (more…)

Most of my personal data is stored on an external USB hard drive. When I recently attempted to access the drive a message appeared saying that the drive is not formatted and asked whether I would like to format the drive. I quickly realised that formatting the drive would result in all data being lost, so I declined the invitation. However, I am now in the position of being unable to access all the data on the drive. I tried rebooting the computer, changing the USB port to which the drive is connected, all to no avail. Do you think the fault lies with the external hard drive or computer? Also, is it possible to retrieve the material from the drive? (more…)

My computer is an IBM 555X, which is at least 19 years old. The battery on the motherboard ran flat several years ago, so I am thinking of simply disposing of this computer. However, I would like to get some data off the hard drive and then destroy the drive before disposing of the computer. Is this possible and how should I go about doing this? (more…)

How do I recover data from a corrupted hard drive that will not boot? Do I need to connect it to the computer as a slave disk? (more…)

Last year I upgraded the hard drive in my computer to a 250 GB drive and also upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 Professional SP4. During the upgrade process I updated the computer BIOS to support the large size of the new hard drive. I now also backup important data to an external 300 GB hard drive. When installing the TrueCrypt application (which you recommended in a recent Tip of the Week) a message appeared saying “Warning: 48 bit LBA ATAPI support is disabled on your system. Therefore you should not write to IDE disks larger than 128 GB. If you do data on the disk may get corrupted. This is a limitation of Windows. To enable 48 bit LBA support add the EnableBigLba registry value in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Parameters and set it to 1. For more information see support.microsoft.com/kb/305098”. Upon checking the registry this entry was absent. I added the entry, as per the error message, and now I can install TrueCrypt without encountering the warning message. I am a bit worried after this message appeared, as I have been writing to two hard drives which are greater than 128 GB before being made aware of this issue. As such, could some of my data have been corrupted? (more…)