OMG! Catastrophic PC Failure

[bdw]

At the weekend my PC power supply failed. That's normally no big deal as I had a spare, so I just replaced it and all seemed well. I got up next morning to find the screen frozen and nothing working. I had to turn off to reboot - well "reboot" is not the right word because the PC refused to start up again.

Long story short - both the graphics card and the hard disk had failed. I am not sure if I had caused some problem while in there changing the power supply or if the failing P/S had caused other problems. I went out and bought new components and replaced them but I was faced with a blank hard disk and I only back up data so all of my sofware and applications were gone.

I had to reload everything and I have been working at ever since. I am almost there but a valuable lesson has been learned!

Now to another problem, when installing Windows XP I ended up with the following drive config list.

3 1/2" Floppy (A: )
Removable Disk (C: )
DVD RAM Drive (D: )
DVD RAM Drive (E: )
Removable Disk (F: )
Removable Disk (G: )
Removable Disk (H: )
Removable Disk (I: )
Local Disk (J: )
Local Disk (K: )

Drive J and K are the only ones that actually exist. J is a partition and K is the main drive (which would normally be C: ).

I have no clue why the installation process decided that the others were present. Can anyone tell me how to get rid of them and also if the real drives can be reassigned?

[estwig]

Leave them, they are SD card reader slots, and other similar types of removable storage, fuji have their own make for example. Windows sees them as empty hard drives.

Edit,
although I'm not sure what the DVD ram drives are, have you installed the dvd drivers??

[JoyDivision]

DVD RAM is just what Windows XP refers to a DVD Wrtier as :). No drivers are usually needed (self install) but you do need software such as Nero because XP does not support DVD writing.

I hope the replacement power supply is a good one.

[bdw]

Everything appear to have settled down now with the system as described but it is an annoyance and havnig a root directory on K: just seems wrong.

[Comspec]

It would seem strange that both your HDD and your Gfx would die as a result of a PS problem tbh, so I might tend to look towards the installation of the new one as being the potential problem here. Some of the cheapy PS might blow your motherboard (and cheapy motherboards assist in this), or you might blow a card or two, but uinlikely that you would blow Gfx & HDD alone.

If you have anything on the old HDD that you need and cannot recreate, feel free to send it to us and we'll see what we can get off it for you - the chances are only the 'electrics' on the HDD are gone, or the head is stuck, so a little work can get most data back if needs be.

You can change your drive allocations if you go into Disk Management (Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc), which may help you get the proper 'feel' back.

[JoyDivision]

You cannot change the system drive letter within windows itself. You might be able to via modifying the registery if you slave the drive.

[bdw]

Yes, as I say it is possible that I caused the secondary problems with static or whatever.

Regarding data recovery, thanks for the offer but I had all of my data backed up. It was really only applications that I lost and I am now back in pretty good shape with these.

[leemason]

For future reference I can highly recommend this: http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/. It will allow you to image your PC system disk onto an external or NAS drive and you can build a good USB stick or CD to boot a new PC and restore the image.