Grr...~mutter~...~grumble~...Hard drive problem!

[Cap'n Sissyfoo]

~grinds teeth~

Right, up to 30 mins ago my HD/D was working fine. All of a sudden it booted to desktop and the system slowed down to a halt so I had no choice but to reboot.

After the system had loaded up the bios it crashed and came up with an error message saying:

"Disk error - press any key to restart"

I rebooted again and it came up with the same error message. I tried it yet again with a boot disk but this time it wouldn't up the boot disk at all and just froze.

I rebooted for a fourth time and this time it couldn't even find the damn drive!

I have checked all the cables and they are all fine. There was an earlier problem with it a week ago but that was due to a jumper doodad being in the wrong place.

I am in Bios now and I can't find the drive at all.

The HD/D does seem to be spinning.

Can't think what the problem could be though.

 

[Cap'n Sissyfoo]

/edit

Okay, after doing some reading it seems that the hard drive has probably crashed and I need to restore it. Any ideas how?

Considering that I can't actually load up a boot disk I am not quite sure how to proceed.

Of course, I could be way off track as well.

Damn

Damn

DAMN!

 

[mid_Efour]

i would think you need another HD with a valid OS on it and setup that HD as a slave, at least then you maybe able to recover some of the files from it...

You say it dosnt even show up on MS-Dos? ie bootdisk type thingy? surely thats a bad sign

THEREFORE! Try and borrow/or use a 2nd HD and use the broken one as the slave see if it will detect if not....... unlucky.

theres some utility called Norton Ghost which does a mirror image of a HD but its a bit late for that now.........

im not a Technical person btw

 

[Deadmanwalking]

How old is it? Make? Model?

 

[Cap'n Sissyfoo]

Quite old, 30gb, Western Digital 307AA.

I have been trying out all the hardware on different IDE slots and all of them work apart from the hard drive. Hmm...

Gonna try my current slave drive in the system and see what happens.

 

[PixyMisa]

I had the same problem on my old Seagate 30GB.

I think that unless you want to pay ££ for data recovery, that data is as good as gone if the drive isnt detected in the bios.

It sucks especially if you have stuff you wanted on it, but it looks like you're gonna have to just search through backups and salvage what you can find.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I had that problem about a month and a bit ago and you seem to have the same symptoms.

 

[old.TeaSpoon]

One thing before you dump it.....

Try using the drive with another power cable, you should have some lurking around in the case