Troubleshooting Hard Drives

Video Transcript

" Hey! I’m James Adams and I’m here with expertvillage.com and now we’re going to talk about troubleshooting hard drives and when to know when to change them and figuring out which key you need to press to go into the boot menu to reinstall windows. Basically when hard drives go bad you start hearing a loud series of clicks basically you’ll wake up in the morning, push the power button and you hear click, click, click, click and you know the part when you’re booting windows XP when you get to the logo well you’re not going to see that, you’re going to see a message says, “operating system not found” and in order to put windows back in the machine you need to replace the hard drive. If you have IDE it’ll be the IDE1 master and if you have a serial ATA basically you just unplug the drive and plug a new one and then we need to figure out which one is the boot key to tell the computer, “Don’t look for a hard drive look for a CD ROM drive.” So now to figure out the boot key you need to turn on the power on your computer and some computers will have the message right up there, like in mine it says, “push F12 for boot menu” now if your computer doesn’t show that you can just start pushing F keys. Let’s say you start the computer all you need to do is keep pushing like normally you should start with F12, so turn on the power to your computer and start typing F12 you might get an error message saying, “keyboard keys stuck” disregard that keep going and eventually you’re going to get to a menu like this. Ok so now my computer I pushed F12 and I got to this menu I can have the option to put up from an internal hard drive, now we’re pretending that windows is busted so this one won’t do me any good, right here I have the option of booting from a network card but I’m not doing that, now here’s the CD ROM, DVD ROM drive when we see this we know we figure out which key, sometimes some computers don’t show up all you need to do is pick an F key start with F12 push the power on the computer and start tapping in F12 until you get a message that gives you an option like this. If that doesn’t happen and you go and the computer continues just turn off the power, push the button back on and tap on the F11 and do it successively for every single key, 99% of the time it’ll be an F key so eventually you’ll figure out this is important for reinstalling windows on your computer and for example the program I’m going to show later on Norton Ghost how to recover a back up that you made. "