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…)

My computer is experiencing some problems when I try to add a SATA hard disk drive. The motherboard (Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9) has the usual two IDE connectors, both of which have the primary and secondary channels occupied with two hard disks, an optical drive, and a Zip drive. The motherboard also has eight SATA connectors, four of which are used by the on-board nVidia chipset. On the assumption that sooner or later one of the IDE channels will fail, I tried to connect a SATA hard drive, as a reserve, to one of the appropriate SATA connectors on the board. The BIOS correctly identified the new drive, but the system would not proceed to boot, displaying the following error message: “Windows could not start because of the following ARC firmware boot configuration problem: Did not properly generate ARC name for HAL and system paths. Please check the Windows documentation about ARC configuration options and your hardware reference manuals for additional information”. I cannot find either of these terms in the Windows Help files or in the manual that came with the system board. The system BIOS has never been updated, nor has the chipset. The computer is running Windows XP SP2. Can you help in getting the system to recognise the SATA hard drive? (more…)

For some time now a blue screen of death appears on a random basis with the following message: “DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. STOP CODE: 0×100000d1 (0×0000006a, 0×00000005, 0×00000000, 0xf867e875 atapi.sys address F867E875 base at F86790000, DATESTAMP 41107b4d”. How can I stop these errors from occurring? The computer is running Windows XP SP2. (more…)