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[LI] [very offtopic] My HardDisk's Fallen and it can't get up



WARNING : long offtopic email

hi,
i've got a huge problem with my HDD, please anyone see if you can help
me. tia.

    first my system's config : a PII 300, 64MB RAM, 4.3 GB HDD , CDROM drive
etc.
    the HDD was primary master and the CD, secondary master.
    what happened was, i got a new HDD of 8 GB and my vendor sent over some
incompetent guy to install it. i asked him to make the new one primary
master and the old one secondary slave. in the process of setting the
correct jumpers, he managed to get the one pair of the pins bent so that
they touched each other (i didn't find that out till next day). now he
couldn't get the bios to detect the old HDD. so he put it as primary slave
and the bios detected it with the jumper on pin 3, ie the wrong position
(/no/ jumper is the slave setting, that too, i found out later). so now it
worked.
    i installed windows on the new HDD, after making a 4 GB partition, and
here's when things begin to look strange. windows does a scandisk of the
drives before installing and it took near 10 minutes for the old HDD
(without surface scan). the rest of the install went off nicely. now when i
started copying my old files, windows hung. i rebooted it and now my old HDD
wasn't detected. i rebooting again and it was back! so i booted into my old
linux installation (after reinstalling lilo) and i get some irq conflict
messages when it tries to access the HDD (old one) and i have to reboot
again and again the HDD isn't detected.
    so now i tried to restore status quo ante, by disconnecting the new one
and seeing if the old one could be made primary master again, now i
discovered the touching pins and separated them and put the jumper at the
master position, but no luck.
    all this time the HDD was spinning constantly.
    my vendor couldn't get it to work at his computer too and it's the
warranty's over too, besides that over 500MB of downloads and programs and
web pages gone plus my painstakingly configured linux install, to say
nothing of 6000 rupaiye ka chuna :-(((((((((.
    thanks for reading this and pleeeze help me somebody.
    tia again (and more later)

rahul

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