Dead HDD?

One of my PCs died, yesterday. This partiucular one dies, crashes or hangs frequently, so I didn't think much of that. I just tried to reboot, but I could not. This PC also is running Partition Magic, and Boot Magic, so I asked Boot Magic to boot from another partition. It did that fine.

But, I still wanted to boot from the partition which had died, so I booted from my Boot Magic emergency disk, disable boot magic, and selected the partition I wanted to boot from as the default, but it still would not boot.

Now, the PC BIOS won't even recognize the HDD at all. I tried to Auto Detect it, but it just sits there. I tried putting the HDD as the 2nd disk in another PC [in case maybe the ribbon cable was bad]. I moved the jumper so that it would be the slave drive, but I got the same result, it just sits there trying to Auto Detect the HDD.

Is there any way I can recover the stuff off of this drive?

Thanks.

 

Hi rlambert7,

"Is there any way I can recover the stuff off of this drive? "

Probably not, but if it were mine I'd play with norton's disk doctor for DOS to see if anything could be done. I have recovered text that way (from floppies), but doubt if I could recover graphics,

A google search on "hard disk data recovery" will turn up several comercial options if your data is impotant and not backed up elsewhre. For example:
http://www.nationwidedatarecovery.com/

 

Hi rlambert7,

Try running the hard drive maufacturers utilities. I have had them "see" and read disks that the BIOS couldn't. They will exit to a DOS prompt where you can copy your data to another disk.

If you run Norton Utilities then you may have made a backup of your boot sector. Some antivirus programs make boot sector backups as well (do you have antivirus emergency boot floppies?), but they may not be able to see the drive if the BIOS doesn't.

Hope you get some luck. Don't forget your backup system when you recover, these downfalls will happen when you least expect them.

Matt