Drive crash, can see D part. but not C part.

Wife told me she cant start windows, gives her a black screen with a dash in upper left corner. Heres what I found.

Dirve makes a click sound every 2 seconds or so. A drive works, but cant use boot floppy cause it cant access hard drive. I was able to use another boot disk, one I downloaded, can get into the 2nd partiion E drive, but cant get into C drive, starts making the click sound then I have to hit reset. Bios sees the hard drive as being there. Even the MaxBlast disk cant see the hard drive.

I put another working drive in, blank but formated. I can see it from floppy but not c drive

She has 98 SE, P4 a Maxtor 15 gig hard drive.

We have info on drive that we need. I kept telling her to clean the drive out so I can back up stuff over our network but...you know.

I read about hitting it, freezing it ( ? ), replaceing the contoller on it.. any other thoughts?

Thank you.

 

You need to confirm that you can read the second partition and it is not the RAM drive or an optical drive. Enter the DIR command and check the listing of files and folders were what was on the second partition. If there is only one harddrive installed, the second partition should be the D: drive. If you can read the second partition, that would most likely mean that the MBR (master boot record) of the drive is corrupt. You would then need a program like Spinrite or the Ontrack recovery program to get the data.

Double-check the "basics ". Reseat the cables. Go to the BIOS settings (motherboard manual) and see if there is an "Autodetect harddrives" section, run that. It may be better to take the drive out of that machine and slave it to the harddrive of another computer, then try to read the data.

It will read the second partition, but not the first, seems strange.

Matt