Minimig won't boot, no display either :(

[Fingerlickin_B]

Minimig arrived today, but isn't working!

My monitor is getting no signal & the "drive" LED keeps flashing six times, pauses, then flashes six times again & so on.

WTF?!?!

I'm using a 5V 450mA power supply if that matters.

Also, I formatted the SD card to "FAT" in XP, which I believe is the required FAT16.

PZ.

[Fingerlickin_B]

From the error flash documentation:

"6: MMC or SD flash card not found/recognized"

Do I need to format the SD card a different way?

PZ.

[Fingerlickin_B]

Well well well, isn't this just the most relaxing night I've ever had!

Now the PC has died, hard drive partitions are GONE!

So...any way to create a Fat16 partition with my Mac?

[musashi5150]

Sorry to hear your troubles Fingerz... drink some beer, that'll help for sure

[Fingerlickin_B]

Originally Posted by musashi5150

Sorry to hear your troubles Fingerz... drink some beer, that'll help for sure

Doing that right now man, don't you worry about that!

I was thinking about backing up my Amiga archive, which I haven't done for a while, the other night...I should have, as I've lost about 2 months worth of stuff

Seriously considering paying a data retrieval mob to see if they can salvage anything from the PC's hard drive

PZ.

[alexh]

If you dont use a regulated PSU... BOOOM!!

[Fingerlickin_B]

Thanks Alex, but I'm a bit more worried about the PC now...as not only have I lost a lot of miggy files, but other people in this house have never backed up, so they've lost EVERYTHING!

[mfletcher]

Fingerlickin,

You sure the HD is completely gone? Have you tried installing it in another PC and seeing if it can be read?

Thanks,

Mark

[Bloodwych]

How have your partitions just gone? I agree with mfletcher.

I've never had a hard drive failure like that, unless I've wiped them myself using a partition manager? I've never had a hard drive die to be honest.

Give us some more details! I can't believe your drive has just died like that.

And I know it's easy to say in hindsight, but external USB hard drives are great for quick backups if you can't be bothered with DVD's. I have two internal drives on my storage PC for data redundancy and one external one as they're so cheap to buy these days.

Come on give us some more details so we can help. It's more likely the hard drive is fixable than instantly dead (I hope). Those data recovery places are a rip off.

[Macca]

Is it RAID'd? Is it RAID 0?

One hard-drive down and thats good night vienna.

If it's a simple setup though (one hard-drive, etc) then you may be able to run some recovery software on it and get it back.

Hirens Boot CD have a lot of stuff on them (available from your local torrent distributor) so it may be worth having a look at that.


M.

[Fingerlickin_B]

Yep, the partitions are most certainly not there, but in another way they certainly are there.

I tried exactly that, put into another PC. Disc Manager could see it, but only as free/unpartitioned/whatever space.

Thought I was screwed at that point, but finally I managed to get Googling right & found "Find & Mount".

I can now see the primary partition (luckily it's the important one) on the HHD using this utility on another PC...thank the good dude!

Only one problem remains, is that the "documents" folders of two users can't be copied or opened, as their accounts were password-protected on the PC.

Any ideas on how I can get around that? I hope so, because one of these users is me! hahahaha

PZ.

[Bloodwych]

Well, if it's just a case of file privileges, you need to access the partition/drive from an admin account which will override the user only privileges.

If the folders have been encrypted - erm, well, you need the original encryption key! Not sure where that's kept in XP (if it's XP you're using), but it should be on the drive somewhere.

I know from a command prompt recovery console you can run "fixmbr" and if you had a boot menu that no longer works, "bootcfg /rebuild".

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

If the drive is healthy enough to access then that's at least a good start.

[Fingerlickin_B]

Thanks man, but it's as if the HDD has been re-formatted, so none of those options seem to have worked.

The only way to see the partition is with a recovery tool...I haven't actually "got it back".

On the machine being used to view the lost stuff when I try to open the protected files it just says "Access denied".

Not really sure where to go from here.

Oh, and no matter how expensive or otherwise the data retrieval guys I are, I have realised I can't use one anyway...there is some (perfectly legal) stuff on this HDD that should not be shared (designs, etc), so I must fix it myself.

PZ.

[Bloodwych]

Messing with the partition table doesn't actually delete any data, making it the same as it was before effectively sorts everything out if it's been changed somehow; neither does a "quick" format, the data is left intact until written over.

Both procedures can be reversed using the right tools and recovery CDs. Can't be more specific without googling up on the issue myself.

The access denied is normal if you haven't got permissions. As long as it's not encrypted, you can take back ownership of a folder from within an Administrator(s) account.

In Win2K/XP Pro, it will have a security tab for the folders properties. In XP Home, you have to hit F8 to enter safe mode and log on as administrator to access the same security tab. From there you can change permissions and take back ownership of the files.

[Fingerlickin_B]

Originally Posted by Bloodwych

In Win2K/XP Pro, it will have a security tab for the folders properties. In XP Home, you have to hit F8 to enter safe mode and log on as administrator to access the same security tab. From there you can change permissions and take back ownership of the files.

Tried that, no dice

Remember, this is the HDD in another machine, not the original one and not actually booting from the bad drive...the bad drive seems unpartitioned without using Find & Mount.

Ah well, at least a couple of people get their files right now...and the Minimig starts to gather dust!

PZ.

[Bloodwych]

A separate machine wouldn't matter if it was just a privilege thing; admin is the king of accounts and can own all others!

The folders must be encrypted - did you password protect the folders rather than just make them private? That would encrypt them. Do a search about recovering the encryption key if that's the case as it'll be somewhere on the boot partition.

[Fingerlickin_B]

Cool man, yeah they were password protected and I might look into that tomorrow.

For the moment I want to get this bloody Minimig going...got home at 5:30 expecting to use it...now 11:20 & I still haven't got it booting...hating life! hahaha

[Fingerlickin_B]

Ok, well here's where I'm at with the PC.
I've managed to properly reinstate the primary partition so that Windows on another machine can see and manipulate it without Find & Mount, but the only copies of the encryption keys are within the encrypted folders, so two people must loose their data.
One person is me, but I found some DVDs I made at the start of the month and it's a backup of my Amiga files, so aside from some recent stuff I'm almost OK there.
The other person is my 10yo son...he'll just have to build his up again, as he backed up nothing...bummer

As for the more important business of the Minimig, I've still had no luck getting it to start.
It still can't recognize the SD card for some reason!

PZ.

[Cerberus73]

if you formatted the card on an XP machine, it will be FAT 32, not FAT 16. ive never found a built in method on XP to do FAT 16 unless its Floppys. dude, use a copy of partition magic or suchlike partitioning tool to do a fat 16 format, or boot from a live linux CD and use gparted to do it.

As for the encryption issues, well there is software out there for dealing with that, also try googling micro$ofts knowledgebase as it has good items on encrypted drives, the reason the vista version is completly diffrent, is that the XP one wasnt that good, and easily bypassed/cracked

[Fingerlickin_B]

Well Mac OSX saw the cards as "MS-DOS FAT16" and error checked them as being fine.

Originally Posted by Cerberus73

boot from a live linux CD and use gparted

But, AH YEAH, that worked!

Thanks man, no idea why the Mac got it wrong, but hey, it's all working now!

PZ.