Hard Drive failure - HELP!

brainstrainer · 10-23-2006, 03:17 PM

Ok, i have two drives, one with a few windows partitions, one with some data partitions.

I recently reinstalled windows, deleted the current c, formatted it and installed XP Pro. As soon as I did that, the second hard disk no longer shows anything, it has no drive letter and disk management shows it as unallocated space (as does partition magic when i boot that from floppy, so not a windows error).

Not sure what the next step is, i need the data off formost, as it has all my work and photos on (included important ones of a wedding i recently did). I have tried a disk recovery program, bit it requires a drive letter to select the disk!!

Any help would be much appreciated,

Pete

superdave1984 · 10-23-2006, 03:23 PM

Do you have another PC handy you can slave the drive in?if not, boot to setup and see if is there. Or try disconnecting the one it can't see, boot as normal, shut down, reconnect, boot to setup and see if it finds it. That is a weird problem though.

brainstrainer · 10-23-2006, 03:25 PM

Hi, thanks but i have tried both of those already with no luck

Pete

superdave1984 · 10-23-2006, 03:28 PM

Well that is a head scratcher then. Sorry I'm not much help to you though. It makes no sense to me why it would be doing that. Have you tried a bootable live Linux CD like Knoppix or Austrumi yet? Then browse to the files.

Redvers · 10-25-2006, 02:47 PM

I have had exactly the same problem rebuilding a friend's pc. He has two Maxtor 120Gb drives. On rebuilding the slave is not recognised. I put it into my pc and it says that it is Foreign.

If I come up with anything I will be sure to let you know.

TheMajor · 10-25-2006, 02:51 PM

Google for 48bit LBA mode and enable it.

brainstrainer · 10-25-2006, 02:55 PM

Thanks - I've made some progression, i've found some software that may be able to recover the files, or if possible rebuild the master boot table (or something - thats probably the problem).

What ive also done is buy a new 250gig disk (should arrive monday), and im going to use a sector by sector copying program (booted from floppy) so that i can work on that, so that if anything goes wrong i still have the original.

Any other thoughts let me know

Pete

brainstrainer · 10-25-2006, 02:57 PM

48bit LBA mode? is it really that simple? and (sorry - not v technical) how do i enable it? - ive tried google, but it keeps popping up win 2000 sp3 and SATA hard disks, neither of which apply! (winxp sp2, ide)

Thanks though!

Pete

TheMajor · 10-25-2006, 03:03 PM

If you have SP2, 48bit LBA mode should already be enabled. Does it display the full size of the disks in disk management?
If you want to verify of LBA 48bit mode is enabled you can use the program http://www.x-setup.net/. Search for 48bit LBA with the integrated seach option.

Try resetting your BIOS. Did you check all cables? Did you try different jumper settings?(master/slave etc.)
Do the disks get detected properly on bootup? (eg. primary master: Maxtor blah blah).

If it show weird characters instead of the drives name on startup your cables may be broken, or your BIOS is messed up. Resetting it may help.

brainstrainer · 10-25-2006, 03:03 PM

ah ok - found it, its enable properly with sp2

Pete

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