Help with a dead Hard drive

Recently while trying to install some accounting software for one of my fellow employees, their HD crashed.
Here's the short of it:
>> I opened up the CD ROM tray - put the disk in -
>> Pushed the close tray button
>> The tray goes half way in and stops
>> Hourglass on the desktop...20mins later hard reset.
>> ...Nothing

I have tried slaving the HD to a Win 2k machine and still nothing
happens. In the bios I can see both HDDs in BIOS (jumpers are set to slave and master respectively) but not in windows or the command prompt.

All that to say that I think the HD is physically damaged (internally) and the company is trying not to pay a lot to send it
off for data recovery. Is there any kind of utility that will let me either slave and copy the data, or recover the disk to a bootable state?


System specs:
Old
Celeron 300 MHz
64 MB RAM
OS - WIN95
34 X CDROM

 

RAMDISK,

I had something similar happen on a system very much like what you have. The problem was that a CD that my daughters had put in did not seat correctly in the drive. For whatever reason, it caused the behavior you described. I was ready to reinstall using a quick restore CD (Compaq) when I discovered I couldn't open the CD drive because the CD was stuck. I removed the CD by manually opening the drive and then rebooted and everything worked fine.

Although it sounds simple, it fixed my problem and I hope it fixes yours.

 

Ramdisk:

Your Win95 drive may be a 16bit FAT that can't be read by Win2K. As to your Stuck CDROM drive being the cause of a hard drive failure or just symptomatic, I'd suggest you physically disconnect the CDROM Drive and see if you can boot up and read the hard drive. You can also try booting to safe mode and then head to Control Panel, Device Manager, then System and look for and remove duplicate device entries. Lastly, or maybe first - check your cmos Battery and make sure it is still holding a charge and thus retaining your settings. When this goes, you will keep losing your hard drive settings and be forced to redetect them in the bios everytime you restart from a full power off state.

 

the cd rom drive did not get stuck. It just stopped as the tray was going in. It was like it lost power (just the CDROM not the whole pc) halfway in. Then the computer froze. The cdrom could be moved back and forth manually but with no reaction on the screen.

I tried the drive in another computer with identical hardware and nothing works. I really think it is the motor inside the hard drive. I just need to salvage the information on it.

 

I might suspect a failing power supply (?). Disconnecting the CD drive like Rockster2U says may reduce the load enough for the hard drives to work properly.

You could get diagnostic utilities from the hard drive manufacturer that should be able to tell you if the drive can be read. These can generally boot (exit) to a dos prompt so that you may be able to copy the info to another disk (Win95/dos format?).


Matt