Comments on: Hard drive woes

Question: Hard drive woes

TurkishGolds — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:12:33 -0800

I have two hard drives: one with windows/software and another with all of my stuff (mp3s, photos, documents, etc). I was listening to music when it suddenly stopped in the middle of a song. The computer was frozen. I rebooted and my second hard drive with all my stuff isn't recognized in windows. No error messages, the drive just doesn't show up. Reinstalled windows. Still nothing. The hard drive is recognized fine by the BIOS. I was running XP, now I'm running 2000. I haven't cried yet becuase I'm not convinced that all of my data is gone forever. What can I do?

By: Sangre Azul

Sangre Azul — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:52:31 -0800

Is the drive not found at all, or does windows detect it as a drive in need of formatting?

I had a drive crash with the latter scenario and ended up using some software to recover my files. The drive itself has remained unrepiarable - can't format it or anything beyond seeing that it has a drive letter assigned.

By: Mayor Curley

Mayor Curley — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 15:01:38 -0800

Download a Knoppix iso and boot from that. See if you can mount the hard drive. I'm sure one of the nice folks at the #mefi irc channel will talk you through it if it seems beyond your abilities.

Knoppix has saved my ass and data twice now.

By: bob sarabia

bob sarabia — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:32:38 -0800

have you tried chkdsk?

By: mr_roboto

mr_roboto — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 16:41:50 -0800

Here's a second endorsement of Knoppix: I just used it to save the data off of a slowly dying drive.

By: b1tr0t

b1tr0t — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 18:56:05 -0800

check the cables:
(1) open up the computer
(2) unplug, then re-plug the HD data cable at both the HD end and the interface end. Most likely the interface goes to your motherboard.
(3) unplug, then re-plug the HD's power cable
(4) inspect the data cable for any breaks. Sometimes cables are tensioned over sharp edges in the case and slowly degrade.

Also, what mr_roboto and Mayor Curley said - try booting a cd-bootable linux distro and checking from there.

By: caution live frogs

caution live frogs — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 14:56:34 -0800

'course your MBR might be toast, which if true means the drive is toast. try some of the rescue tools above, and try also PC Inspector (thanks to an earlier ask.mefi discussion on favorite software...) - promises to find and fix "missing" hard drive partitions, even if not found by windows.

good luck.