I closed the lid on the IBM ThinkCentre A50 before it was completely shut down and got a BSOD, and it's never booted again.

HDAT2 reports "Firmware Corrupted" and there's a few checksum errors also.

Is it possible to reflash the firmware?

Unfortunately it's not a cellphone so it's not as simple as that. See below.


viewtopic.php?f=16&t=6562

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Okay so I read the thread. It starts off comparing the forum to child abuse, so it was difficult to take it seriously. The thread says that the forum's information is spread out all over the place, that the OP is going to consolidate that information, and then a lot of useless meaningless words meandered around and all I can remember is that if I spend too much time on this forum, I'm going to beat my children. I assume that was not the message I was supposed to get.

Is it certain the firmware is corrupted, based on HDAT2? If so, is reflashing the firmware a fix? If so, how does one go about doing that?

A drive has numerous firmware modules. Only a few of them are updated by a firmware upgrade. If your drive has a damaged firmware module, then this will most likely not be addressed by any update. In fact the affected module may even be unique to your drive.

That said, I'm wondering where HDAT2 is getting its information. Can you provide more detail?

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Earlier this evening I ran HDAT2 from the Hiren's disk, and it saves it's reports to the "R:\" RamDrive, but I cannot figure out how to get my 16 Gbyte USB thumbdrive recognized so I can copy the report over.

Is there a trick to getting a thumbdrive recognized in Hirens?

EDIT***
Decided to solve the problem by creating a Hiren's Bootable USB. When it's done, I'll get the HDAT2 data. Thanks for the responses.

Okay so I've managed to get the system configured so that HDAT2 will save it's reports to my thumbdrive.

I'm using HDAT2 off of two Hiren's disks. One is ver. 9.6 or so and the other is ver. 15.x. the earlier version of HDAT2 clearly says "firmware corrupt" on the main screen, as well as a checksum error, while the later version only mentions the checksum error.

Also note the model "WD800BB-00JHC0" in the title is correct and printed on the HD's label, but this name is corrupted in various places, such as the file name in the .BIX file (see attached, "B__0JHC0.rar") from HDAT2, as well as these excerpts (below) from the HDATCOPY.TXT and HDETECT.TXT from HDAT2 (also attached).

from HDATCOPY.TXT:


from HDETECT.TXT:


I don't know how significant the "naming corruption" issue is. When I try to paste the text from HDATCOPY.TXT it appears normal, so I've pasted a screen-shot instead.

I hope this data is useful. Please let me know if there is anything else I can provide that may be of value. Thanks for the help.

Your drive has a stuck bit on the IDE interface.

If you compare the data in the IDENTIFY DEVICE dump against the expected data, you will see that bit #13 is stuck low. This corresponds to pin #14 on the IDE interface.

Here is the pinout:
http://pinouts.ru/HD/IdeInternal_pinout.shtml

Remove and reseat the IDE cable, examine the connectors for a bent pin, check the HDD PCB for a dry solder joint where the connector attaches to the board, or try another cable.

The following article explains the problem in more detail.

Bad model number due to stuck bit in IDE interface:
http://malthus.zapto.org/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=147&p=262

You can see the bit differences here:

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I replaced the IDE cable and the model name appears normally now, however it still will not boot. Right now I have Easeus Partition Manager (Server) from the Hiren's 15.x disk running, looking for partitions. Easeus reports the HD as being 100% unallocated.

I wonder if running "FIXBOOT" on a proprietary (IBM) system drive could have caused this? Years ago, I ran fixboot on a Dell HD and discovered I broke some kind of code that allowed you to access a hidden Data Restore partition. Thanks for the help so far. I'll update the thread when Easeus has finished it's run. Is there anything else I should be doing?

I've personally come to grief with FIXBOOT, but that's a different problem. "Unallocated" means that there are no partitions in the partition table in sector 0.

You could try Partition Find and Mount:
http://findandmount.com/

Otherwise show us the contents of sector 0. You could use a disc editor, eg DMDE freeware.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Good News.

Find & Mount found the whole 80 Gbyte partition and all the data is there. However, it appears Find & Mount does not "recover" the partition. It seems to only allow the data to be recovered.

Is there a way to make Find & Mount recover the partition, or is there some other software that can do this?

Note: I'd like to mention for anyone else that is following this thread in similar circumstances, Find & Mount found a partition when Easeus Partition Master (Server), Partition Magic and several others could not. Depending on the software, some found 4 Gbytes (out of 80 Gbytes) of a FAT32 partition, 400 Mbytes of a FAT16 partition and two partitions that were FAT12 (of all things). In short, trash. None of the data displayed had a date of later than 2006, so these partitions were probably from a previous life before the HD was repurposed for this particular computer.

Also, the Find & Mount website does not give detailed instructions on how to use the software on a local (malfunctioning) computer. It assumes the bad HD is installed on another computer as a secondary drive, and the software is "formally" installed on that computer. I installed the software on my (working) desktop, and then simply copied the "C:\Program Files\Find and Mount\*.*" data directory to the root of the thumbdrive and booted the thumbdrive with Hiren's ver 15.x and launched "Mini-XP" to provide an operating system within which to launch the Find & Mount executable. The copied, installed executable will launch "standalone" in this (and probably) any other environment, and does not need to be formally installed, with registry entries, etc... In short, you can copy the installed data to any transportable media and run the program anywhere.

Neither the "Fast Intellectual Scan" or the "Normal" scans found the full 80 Gbyte partition. I had to select the slowest option ("Thorough Scan"), and the full partition did not show up until the scan was almost complete. It took about 2 hours on an 80 Gybte HD running a Celeron processor and 1 Gbyte RAM, to give some sense of scale.

I suspect that the FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12 "partitions" were probably templates embedded in some EXE file such as Diskpart, etc.

The fact that Find & Mount located a partition near the end of the scan suggests that it may have found a backup boot sector at the end of an NTFS volume. If so, then you could use a tool such as DMDE to "insert" this partition into the partition table in sector 0. However, before you write anything to the drive, I suggest you show us the contents of the backup boot sector, if any.

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This is the 1st time I've ever used a disk/hex editor software.

As best as I could figure out, what I needed to do is "copy" Sector 0, and then "write" it to the thumbdrive. Please find attached. Forum software will not allow me to attach a .bin file, so I've .rar'd it.

Please let me know if this is correct.

The MBR code was written by Windows XP:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mb ... br.htm#CHS

The partition table is full of 0x0020 words (unicode space characters?). I've never seen this before, so I can't imagine how this happened. It's bizarre, but it explains why the drive is identifying as "unallocated".



Our next step is to locate the backup boot sector.

To speed up the search, you could start searching near the end of the drive.

To this end, select Editor -> Goto Offset.

In the Sector box you will see a sector range. Choose a sector that is about 20000 sectors from the end (1 cylinder = 255 x 63 = 16065).

Sector Offset = 0

Now select Tools -> Search for Special Sector -> Boot Sector.

If you don't find anything, try starting from an earlier sector.

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DMDE gives you the option to manually scroll down to the last sector, and then search for NTFS boot sectors "backwards". It then found this sector within 3 seconds. Please find attached.

I'm assuming that I'm going to copy this sector and then write it to Sector 0?

Thanks for the heads up. I'm still using version 2.4.4 which doesn't have the reverse search option (unless I Search String in Object). BTW, you can go to the end of the user area by typing Ctrl-End.

Anyway, the boot sector is telling us that the partition begins at sector 63 (= 0x3F) and has a size of 80GB (= 0x0950A5C0 x 512).

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/NTFSBR.htm

Once again this boot sector was written by Windows XP:
http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mb ... rHexEd.htm

My next step would be to examine sector 63 and the sectors immediately before and after.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Please find attached.

ISTM that you initialised your drive while bit #13 was stuck. That's why 0x00 bytes appears as 0x20.

Your boot sector (sector 63) has been zeroed, but the data pattern is 0x0020 instead of 0x0000. That also explains the damage to the partition table in sector 0.

The next sector has also been rewritten. This is how yours looks ...



Here is mine:



I was hoping that the solution would have been as simple as copying the backup boot sector over the top of sector 63, and then using it to reconstruct the partition table, but the damage looks more extensive than that.

I think the safest approach would be to use PF&M to copy the files to another drive, perhaps an external one, or maybe another flash drive.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Is it possible that you initialised the drive while it had the stuck interface bit, then changed the IDE cable, and finally used FIXMBR to refresh the MBR code?

This would explain why the partition table is damaged but the MBR code is intact.

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Running FIXBOOT against the drive while the interface was faulty could explain the corruption in the NTLDR sector.

Assuming you have backed up your data, I would try to repair your file system as follows.

Edit -> Edit Mode

Tools -> Copy Sectors
Copy the backup NTFS boot sector over the top of sector 63.

Drive -> Apply Changes.

Editor -> Goto Offset
Sector -> 0

Change all occurrences of 20 in the partition table to 00.

The table should now look like this:



Drive -> Select Drive

Check the Show Partitions box

Select your physical drive and OK

R-click the 80GB partition and select Insert the Partition (Undelete)

This should add the 80GB partition to the partition table in sector 0.

Now exit DMDE.

Reboot the system and allow Windows to rediscover the drive.

Now run FIXBOOT against the drive. Hopefully this will undo the damage to the NTLDR stuff.

WARNING: Please backup your data. I have personally been stung by FUXBOOT. In my case it wrote a 10MB FAT12 boot sector over a FAT32 file system and caused me lots of grief. I have seen even worse damage in several storage forums.

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The data isn't what's valuable on the HD, it's the O/S and the configuration settings, drivers, etc... It's part of a business network, and if the O/S goes bad I'll have to find a disk compatible with the Product Key, do a New Install, fully update, install drivers for several devices, set IP addresses for network printers, etc... and install several proprietary, industry-specific softwares in order to get the machine back to it's former functionality.

About 20 hours of my time, 10 of which will have to be spent on-site. I'm pretty clear on most of what you've said, but not sure why I can't simply copy/paste the "back-up" sector to sector 63?

I assume that Sector 63 is the start of the old partition. Is it always sector 63, or does that change? Is the data in Sector 63 simply a "start of partition" marker, like a "start of file" marker, or is there more to it than that.

Your pasted data is so similar to mine that I can't help but wonder what would happen if I pasted that in.

I'll do the manual edit as you've suggested. Do you know of any data back-up technique/method that will allow me to avoid having to reinstall the whole O/S? Can I make an image of the HD as it is right now, reformat and recreate the partition and then overlay the copied image on top of the new partition?

Does it work like that?