I'm trying to use BartPE to access a USB hard drive. I can boot into BartPE just fine, but it fails to see the hard drive; there's no apparent access at all, though I can hear the platter spin up.

Does anyone have any experience with accessing USB hard drives via BartPE? Do I need to add a driver? If so, I can't find anything.

I don't have an answer for your question as such. Have you tried UBCD4WIN? I've had reasonably good results with that.

I finally found this piece of information:



So it seems like I have to use UBCD4Win anyway. If they can do it, why can't BartPE? Or at least have an obviously available plugin for it?

Looks like I wasted the many hours of grinding through that failing hard drive for nothing, since I have no where to save it now. Argh.

I got called to work last night to investigate what I was told was a worn out fan. Turned out it was an HD. What do you think caused this to happen?

Is that a little bit of copper wire I see sticking out of the spindle? If so, I'm guessing that the motor failed catastrophically and probably threw the platter out of position.

I think it's just a reflection.

Wow, that's the worst condition I've ever seen a platter in. You sure it hasn't been dead for ages and nobody noticed until it actually started making noise? If I had to wager, it looks like some foreign material got caught in the r/w head and happily sanded the platter for you. I'd be VERY surprised if that just happened in a short amount of time.

Hey, at 7200rpm, a bit of hard substance on the heads would tear up the entire platter rather rapidly. Seconds..

Old Age!

UBCD4Win seems to be working like a champ. I can't imagine why anyone would ever use plain-flavor BartPE.

Thanks for the hint, Andrew.

Is there a version of that that will boot/run from a USB stick, skipping the need for CD/DVD ?

Yes. Both of them, apparently. I didn't really research that, though.

The drive itself is only a couple of years old and I was logged into the machine only last week. I'm currently installing a new HD to replace it. Shame 80GB is the smallest drive you seem to be able to get now.

Sigh... you're making me feel really old. It seems like just yesterday that I was excited because I could get a whole gigabyte of disk storage on my computer for less than a week's pay. Now you "complain" (I know you're not really complaining, just commenting) because 80 times as much storage costs about an hour's pay. That's a cost per megabyte reduction factor of more than 3,000! Or take it to the extreme... I remember paying about what an 80 GB hard drive costs today for a box of twenty 360 kilobyte diskettes, for a cost reduction factor of 11,000. Or, most extreme example in my experience... the first computer I ever used, a Datapoint mini-computer in 1976, had a 5 MB hard drive that cost $8,000 and was so unreliable that the service techs lost money on a $12,000 annual service contract. If I crunched the numbers correctly, that Datapoint's cost per megabyte was 4,000,000 times as much as an 80 GB drive is today. Let's see... 80 GB drive, $32, that comes to $0.0004/MB. Can that be right? Four one-hundredths of a penney per megabyte? 5 MB drive, $8,000, that comes to $1600 per megabyte. Yep, four million times as expensive.

And in five years we'll probably be wearing computers on our wrists with storage counted in terabytes, or perhaps a whole new paradigm where "storage" as such is an obsolete concept, analogous to saying "I have 29 million books in my house" when I have a link to the Library of Congress.

Time flies when you're having fun!

tanstaafl.

80GB is disposable. I have a couple of 250Gb disks banging around for test purposes, but if it's smaller than that, I just don't get out of bed.

This is why I
a) put off replacing still-functional technology items
2) buy 'last year's model' at reduced price

I just can't make the numbers work for buying cutting edge stuff. I'd rather wait for the bugs to get worked out (or found out!) and pay less for a more robust piece.
I recently stepped into the DSLR world with a Canon D300 for $185. It does all that I need it to do. When new, they were $999.

Tell me about it!

Funny how mechanical technology of disks beat electronics like processors and memory in miniaturization, capacity and price/performance improvement... Twenty years ago, when disk access time reached 30ms, I thought we couldn't do much better with mechanical device, and that the necessary next step would be some kind of holographic optical storage (which is, strangely enough, perpetually "around the corner", much like controlled fusion).