Hardrive not seen? what can i do?

[luvvbuzz]

Hi, i have had two hardrives for over a year, my slave drive suddenly packed up on sunday. When i booted my computer on sunday in the start up screens it told me of an error in my slave drive. teh when i got into windows my slave drive was not there in the drives list.

I have booted into the bios and tried to autodetect the slave harddrive but it isnt being recognized at all there either.

is there something i can do at home to get the data off the slave drive or is it lost forever?

I would like to try to get at least some data off of it before i bin it.

thanks.

[bevills1]

Check the power and IDE cables to be sure they're still connected, and try another IDE cable to see if it may be a bad IDE cable.

[Nelson37]

Definitely R & R the cables. Is this IDE or SATA? Try a different channel, if IDE remove from the Master/Slave relationship (Don't forget to change the jumper on the primary). Try the drive all by itself with the primary disconnected, possible the power supply suddenly got too weak to power both. Try a new drive cable, and a different power connector as suggested.

Definitely try a different PC, if possible.

Not recognizing in BIOS is indeed a serious problem, but not necessarily a complete killer. My favorite recovery program is called GetDataBack. You can get a demo which will tell you if it can read the drive at all, before you spend money to actually recover anything.

If you have another identical drive to the failed one, you can try carefully exchanging the circuit board on the drive and test it that way.

Does the dirve power up and spin? You can tell by holding it in your hand, the gyroscopic force is usually quite noticeable. Does it spin up and then down, knocking noises, totally dead, what?

[Ethlred]

If what bevills1 said doesn't help you could try it in another PC.

If you can't see the drive no matter what, including in the Disk Manager. Then the drive may have a bad board. That would require a specialist. Expensive.

However if the drive shows up, say as unformatted or unpartioned then you could try a file recovery utility. Some can read a drive even when there is damage to the surface itself.

DO NOT REFORMAT. DO NOT REPARTITION. Not if want to recover anything in the future. It can be done but the results are messy at best.

Do not recover to the same drive. You must save to another place.

Some utilities I know of:

Search and Recover now at version 5. It can image the disk which is useful when there is physical damage. Not needed if there is only a borked directory.

R-studio. Its Russian and very geeky. But it can even deal with RAID. It will also image a drive.

On Track. I don't know much about it. Other than its cost a lot more than the other two.

If you trash the drive someone could use these or other utilities to recover data. You might want to destroy the surfaces.

There are other utilities. A search for file recovery will find a lot. Some won't do much more then recover deleted files. Some can recover from a reformat.

[ranchhand]

IF the drive has not failed mechanically, you can pull your data off. I do it all the time. Get UBCD or Knoppix, both free. They load an OS into working memory and enter the drive directly. As long as the drive has not failed mechanically you can get your data off.

[Bjs]

A: What exactly was the error ?

If the control board has failed, and the drive is mechanically fine, you are not going to get anywhere without some technical expertise involving control board, or platter swap method. This requires a matching drive in which the control board can be obtained from, or partially disassembled for platter swap over.

Recovery tools or linux will not help in the case issue is with control board, or for that matter, issue is mechanical.

As suggested, it could simply be a failed cable, or even a psu issue.

If IDE, you should change the drive through the various settings, ie, M, S, and CS. Sometimes a drives control board develops an unusual fault where master has become disabled and no longer recognized, yet when set as CS, all is fine.

Sata on the other hand, can only be moved around sata channels, so it be worth investing in a secondary cable should this problem appear in which you could use during the test of the data cable, and sata port it is connected to. Also, with sata, check bios settings have not changed which may have contributed to the fault, ie, some channels have been disabled, or in wrong mode.

If there is an issue with the 5volt supply from the psu on the connected channel, this would prevent communication with the device. Try another power connector from the psu, and recheck bios, if no go, and another system is not available for test, consider psu replacement may be due.

If you are unable to establish communication with the drive, as a last resort before either professional help is involved, or trashing the drive completely to prevent anyone else accessing the data, it would be recommended taking the drive to another system for test, ie, see if that systems bios dose detect the drive.

If the drive is detected, and ok, this would point to an issue with the original system, but also consider grabbing the data now.
If not, and the data is non-critical, either rma it under warranty, or disassemble the unit, trash the platters, and bin it.

[themaster1]

well remember we're in summer, computers don't likethis time of the year
I second the "cable look up" for now

[luvvbuzz]

I got a new drive. I have plugged it in. It is recognized in the bios setup. but i cant see it in the windows explorer window. I entered the disk manager in control panel and the drive is there looking like this



i put the jumper on cable select, at the back of the drive. so have i forgotten to do something? is it because the drive is stated as unallocated? if so, how do i allocate it?

Thanks

[Krispy Kritter]

If the drive is seen in Disk Manager, then you simply need to partition and format. Just right click on the drive in Disk Manager, the options are there.

[luvvbuzz]

The new slave drive is now installed and working fine. I tried the drive that had stopped working, again just to check to see if anything had changed, but yet again it wasnt seen in the bios, wasnt in explorer, and wasnt in disk management either. Is there no way of me getting the data off it at home if the drive is not recognized in the bios? its just ya standard IDE maxtor 120gig but its got a lot of music on it that i would like to keep if i can. also some files from my website which would make life a lot easier if i still had them.

thanks for the help and replies so far.

[bevills1]

Is the unrecognized drive jumpered correctly, i.e. jumper set to slave and connected as slave? Try connecting to a different IDE channel to see if BIOS recognizes it. You might also try setting jumper to master and connecting as master to secondary IDE channel to see if BIOS recognizes it that way. You could try connecting to another computer to see if it's recognized, but there's probably no way to get any data from it unless it's recognized in BIOS.

[Josh Mickens]

how would you even go about setting it to slave or master?

[ßsimian]

there are jumper pins between the ide connector and the power connector. the settings should be listed on the drive's label.