The rest of the solutions
From: Scott Wittell, MCP A+
I had to laugh when I saw this easy fix, and it does work. We were able to bring back a failed drive in an older HP server running NetWare 4.11. First step is to remove the drive from the machine. Second, hold the drive flat in your palms. Third, shake the drive a few times in an up-and-down motion, like you're trying to hammer a nail. Don't let the drive hit the floor though. I've used this technique on numerous occasions, works every time.
From: Colle Davis
The Hair Dryer Method
For the last resort (when the drive really did die, it-is-not-even-spinning type crashes), there is a possible solution that comes from the early days of hard drives. Back then you were not supposed to turn them off—I don't know why but IBM said never turn them off unless you are standing there.
One of our main computers was housed in a closet where I could not hear it well and had a power supply failure that apparently took days to complete. I happened to open the closet for some other reason and discovered a warm box and immediately went through the shut down sequence to take it off line for a new power source.
Several days later, the unit was shut down again for a long weekend of downtime on a routine maintenance schedule and upon restarting the system the hard drive would not work. I am pretty good at backing up everything but could not find the backup disk anywhere. Panic. I am the author of a newsletter that goes to hundreds of subscribers everyday, and the mailing list was on the dead drive. I replaced the drive and reloaded everything but was going through sobbing spells as I looked for solutions to recover the lost data. Data recovery companies wanted over five thousand dollars to try to recover the data.
A client of mine told me he once possessed an old 286 that required a hair dryer to get it running every time he turned it on. The fellow who had built it for him was an IBM technician and gave him the hair dryer idea because that is what IBM used to do to restart the drives in down machines. So on the bench machine with the drive out where the dryer could get to it and still be hooked up, I began the process. Lo and behold, it worked. While it was running, I downloaded all the missing data and immediately uploaded it to the new drive. Don't laugh, I got my outcome and can now say I recovered a fully dead hard drive with my wife's hair dryer.
From: John B.
As for me, I have had good success with this method (about 50-50).
I take the drive, and suspend it 4" over a plastic carpet tool (one of those things you see in an office to help the chair wheels go). I then let it "fall" while still holding it, twice on each long edge, then once flat on top and bottom. You want firm, but not too hard raps on the plastic. I find that the carpet underneath seems to cushion the blow just enough. This appears to work on drives with stuck read-write heads most of the time. If the center bearing is locked up, nothing short of a miracle will bring it back. In any case, have a second drive ready to receive your files when you attempt to restart.
From: Tony
A. Dead system—System "A"
B. Known working system—System "B"
C. I am assuming that the system board is posting and responding in the correct manner. And that no Jumpers have been moved on any of the equipment.
Step 1. Verify power to Hard Drive (HD), Multi-tester (VDC), or another system plug. If power (See step #2) If no power, swap/replace plugs/power supply.
Step 2. Swap hard drive from A to B and boot. If boot, then HD is good. (See step #3) If No-boot, then replace HD.
Step 3. REMOVE...DISABLE if onboard.... all un-needed devices from System A...modem, sound card...etc.
NOTE: Label HD ribbon cables A and B before removal from systems. "A" for System "A" and "B" for System "B")
Step 4. Remove from system A and B the HD, and ribbon cable that connects it to the motherboard...(MB)
Step 5. Swap drive and cables from B to A and connect to MB. If boot then controller on MB "A" is good (See step #6.) If No-boot then MB controller is bad.... replace MB.
Step 6. Return HD's and cables to original systems, Remove HD ribbon cables from both systems, swap B for A and boot...If boot then ribbon cable on A is bad...replace. If No-boot then... Balance your check book, and get out the sale pages...you've got bigger problems!!
From: Eddie N.
The two techniques that I have used to get a failed hard drive to come back to life is to Sys the drive from a boot disk and/or to use the fdisk/mbr command form a boot disk. I have used these together and independent of each other.
From: Paul W.
Dead disk drives?
There's a bunch of steps I would take if the drive weren’t being recognized by either the auto setup or manual entry.
1) Check your Master/Slave/Standalone jumper settings and make sure they are correct and don't conflict with another device on the same IDE channel.
2) Check for bent pins on the connectors.
3) Try a known good cable—Floppy and IDE cables often seem to go down the gurgler at the worst possible time for some unknown reason.
4) Try a known good drive on your IDE channel and check the channel. If it doesn't respond:
· Try another IDE port (if there's two)
· Disable onboard IDE and try another I/O card (one that’s known to be good of course)
5) Try the disk in another PC.
6) Here's where it starts getting tricky. By now you must be reasonably convinced you have a bad case of galloping disk rot. On some drives (not all), if you have an identical same model drive, you can swap over the logic board. This will let you know if it is the embedded controller on the logic board. With luck, your disk will roar into life and you can suck the data off onto somewhere safe.
7) If your disk is making a hideous noise like a peg-legged man with a vacuum cleaner on a wooden floor (whirrr, clunk, whirrr, clunk....), then it is likely you have a dropped head. This is where you have start making decisions about how much your data is worth, because to go any further is going to cost big time and may require factory technicians to try and repair the disk in a clean-room environment. If your data was that important, then it would have been backed up. (Of course it would have been, they all respond in loud voices)
8) She's dead, Jim. How fast can you type?
In a nutshell, this is my summary of the death cycle of a hard disk.
From: Daniel F.
Get an identical Hard Drive and swap out the Logic Unit (Electronic Board). Set your CMOS to auto-detect. You’re good to go!!!
From: Miles H.
· Check cables are on and are the correct way round.
· Check jumpers to ensure the disk has the correct setting (depending on otherisks or CD-ROM used on the same controller, if any).
· Check Bios setting for Model of PC is current. Download latest version if necessary.
· Boot from DOS floppy, use FDISK to check if disk can be seen. If the disk is there, then I would suggest using GHOST or similar to copy the image from disk to disk.
· If the disk was not apparently running, I would swap the disk out and install it into a PC that was working.
· The options here would be to have the 'faulty' disk as the master or slave depending on your situation.
· If installed and works as master, ghost the image to the network.
· If installed as slave, boot the PC and use ghost to copy from disk to disk or to Network.
· If disk was still in a state of absolute failure, I would suggest contacting the disk manufacturer to ask their advice.
· They may have some low-level disk checking/repairing software.
· I would also install a new disk into the original PC with O/S on and ask the user to ensure all data is put onto the network (if possible).
· If all else fails, then you'd have to chalk it up as experience and hopefully someone would learn to ensure sufficient backup procedure were implemented.
· Therefore, the next time this happened it would not matter. You would be able to reinstall the O/S and Applications (manually or automate) and restore data back to the user (if held locally).
From: Lawrence Shipinski
Easy, go to Maxtor's Web site or Seagate Web site and download the utility software. It's free. Please back up whatever you can first!
From: Jake G.
Well, I'm kind of new to this, but I'll throw my hat in the ring.
First, I would try flashing the CMOS. If the battery is built into the system board (I bet it is), then find the CMOS jumper, pull it–—or move it from pins 1-2 to 2-3—then kick the power on for a few seconds. Power down; put the CMOS jumper where it started. If the battery is removable, then pull the battery and flash the CMOS.
Try rebooting.
If that doesn't work, put the Quick Restore disks in, reboot, and exit to DOS when you get the chance (I don't remember the exact steps to that). Now, depending on how this QR was put together, you may have to change to a virtual –drive—possibly N: and then the TOOLS directory. You may be able to do this straight from the A: or C: prompt. Run the command FDISK /MBR and reboot.
If it still doesn't work,then I would have to check into a disk utility you can run from a bootable floppy (assuming you can even get that far). Don't have a whole bunch of experience with those. The next step after that is to just swallow hard and kiss that data bye-bye. You could replace the hard drive but why keep a relic like that around when you could buy another one five times as good for the same money the Prolenia cost you when it was new?
From: Gordon G., IT Manager
The following is the normal procedure used at my company (before sending the hard drive to a data recovery agency).
1. Return the BIOS to the original state. If "auto" for hard drive then "auto,” otherwise to "user defined" with LBA enabled for Microsoft's operating systems.
2. If the system still doesn't boot off the hard drive, then boot off a write-protected bootable floppy using the same operating system and version as what is on the C: drive.
3. If there is no hardware error during the boot process, see if the c: drive can be accessed at all. If it can be accessed and files and directories can be viewed, now is a good time to back up files if the physical condition of the hard drive is suspect.
4. Check the hard drive with an antivirus program. Sometimes computer viruses damage the boot sector. A good antivirus program will identify the problem and may even correct the situation.
5. If there is no virus found on the c: drive, then run "sys c:" to restore the boot files to the hard drive. Only run the sys command if you are sure the BIOS settings are the same for the hard drive as before the problem was reported. One way to check this is to look at the file and directory structure of the drive. If you see garbage, then the settings are probably not the same (or the FAT was corrupted). Reboot the system after running sys.
6. If the drive boots, you're almost done. If not, then reboot off the diskette and scan the drive for errors. Reinstall the operating system without formatting the drive.
7. If the drive makes any unusual sounds or doesn't spin, then your best option is to send the drive to a data recovery agency. Attempting to recover data from a physically damaged disk usually results in further damage to the drive and little chance of recovering any data later. The best question to ask here is "What is your time and data worth?"
8. In step 6, I said that if the drive boots you're almost done. What's left? Make that recovery diskette, make a backup of the drive and thoroughly scan the hard drive for any physical errors. Perform the scan last, since the drive may fail during a scan if there are any physical problems with the drive mechanism.
From: Traci N Thrash
I hope you have good luck on your data recovery. Usually, the first thing I do is to pray, then scold the user GENTLY for not making backups. I hope they never ask to see MY backups.
1. Pull the disk. Put it in a known working machine. This gets you out of the malfunctioning environment and into a controlled space, YOUR workbench.
2. Try "Auto config" to set the drive type.
3. If "Auto config" does not find the correct drive type, you have two options:
· Read the actual specs off the drive label (this may or may not work, depending upon whether the set-up tech used them or not).
· Use a disk utility to read the specs off of the drive.
4. If this does not work, is the drive spinning?
· If not, try to "shock" it by setting it flat upon the table top, applying power, and rapping it on the side a couple of times with a plastic-faced hammer or handle of a screwdriver. Don't be afraid to rap it pretty good, these little guys are pretty sturdy nowadays, and worst case...you already have a broken drive! (Often you will hear the drive spin up immediately.) Time to BACK UP (Grab the data and run).
· If it is spinning, power it down and clean the connector with the cleaner of your choice. I like pre-moistened alcohol prep pads from a medical supply. Put the cables back on and try again.
5. Sometimes, it helps to remove the PC board from the drive and reinstall it. (Connector problem again.)
6. Disk utilities like SpinRite, Disk First Aid, or Disk Rescue are useful (but only if the drive is actually spinning.)
In every case, back up the data the minute you see anything that even looks like a directory. Have a drive ready to put it on. I like to have a disk drive connected to my test machine and put everything there ASAP. You might be advised to use the "new" drive that will go into the user's machine. Don't put the "bad" drive back unless you just like to make service calls over again. These steps have made me a hero more than once on my 17 years as a PC tech and/or salesman. Hope they work for you.
From: Geoff G.
Here's my solution to the quiz "How do you bring a hard drive back to life?"
In order to make the best use of a drive that may be failing, one could take
the following steps:
1. Check the system to see if the drive will detect and boot up successfully. If so, skip to step 5 for backup/data retrieval procedures.
2. If the drive is not detecting properly on the system, check to see if the problem can be solved in the systems bios, by either manually reconfiguring the drive, or by autodetecting it. If this works, skip to 5.
3. If the drive simply will not work in that system, try putting it in another system that is working properly with a similar hard drive (the same drive type and/or size if possible). If the drive works in this system, but not in the original system, then perhaps the old system has more serious problems such as a bad IDE controller.
4. Try booting up on the drive. If it will not boot properly, try FDISK or some other partition viewer to see if it has valid partitions defined. If no valid partitions are defined, or if partitions are unformatted, then the data may be lost. Try redefining to the exact same partitions that were known to exist before the problems were encountered. If you have a working drive at this point, but no data, then it is likely that data is gone. If irreplaceable data was lost, you can try bringing the drive to a hardware shop for professional data retrieval.
5. If any of these attempts to revive the drive has succeeded, then immediately bring the system up and back up any important files to another drive or to removable media. Run scandisk and/or any other drive checking utilities. If serious problems are found with the drive, or if you have suspicion that the drive will continue having more problems like this, then prepare to replace the drive. While you still have a working system, make a complete backup if possible. Perhaps the entire drive image can still be retrieved and copied onto the new drive, and no system re-install will be necessary.
From: Chris Heizmann
I. If the drive works intermittently and won’t boot to Windows:
1) Create a boot disk on a different machine if available (format c: /s).
2) Use the boot disk to start the machine in DOS.
3) Switch to drive c:\.
4) Copy all data files to floppy (more than one disk will be needed).
II. If the drive does not work at all.
· 1) Open up the case.
· 2) Locate and remove the Hard Disk Drive.
· 3) Tap on the side of the hard drive with a screwdriver a few times (not too hard).
· 4) Re-install the drive and start the PC.
· 5) If the PC boots to Windows, backup all data files via MSbackup.
6) If the PC won’t boot to Windows, follow the above instructions.
From: David A. Hunt
· First establish the correct drive characteristics (cylinders, sectors, kapazität usw.) from the drive or from internet if not printed on the casing.
· Check all cables and connections (Power, EIDE, or SCSI).
· Turn on the Power and correct the BIOS.
· Watch for failures such as controller failure during bios check.
· Listen for unpleasant noises (after head crash).
· If the PC won't boot from disk, use a boot disk in the floppy and establish if drive C is available.
· If not, try Fdisk and see if a drive is visible (if not, it's starting to look bad...).
· If visible and reachable, copy any important data to floppy disk (if possible) or another drive if available.
· Revive the boot block, and try booting from the drive again.
· If the drive wasn't visible, then remove the drive and try to revive it in another PC.
· Sometimes removing the drive and gently shaking it can help to revive it if the user hasn't been using his PC on a regular basis, especially in older PCs.
Anyway, this a problem one can spend hours with, it just depends on how important the data was. Only cowards work with a backup!!!!
From: Mauri Presser
· Check the CMOS setup for drive settings.
· If an auto detect drive option is there, use it.
· Save the settings and reboot.
· Listen to see if the drive is spinning by putting your ear close to the drive (hopefully the drive is not so loud that you do not need to get close to it to hear it).
· If it does not spin, shut down the computer.
· Check to make sure pin one of the cable is on pin one of the drive (you might have seen a steady drive activity LED lit up if it was backwards).
· If one was on one, then physically remove the drive and FIRMLY holding on to it, twist your wrist in an attempt to break the "sticktion" (bearings stuck) free.
· Hook the drive back up and power up to a boot floppy.
· If it spins up now, try FDISK or other third-party software to see if it recognizes the partition(s).
· If not, try Norton Disk Doctor or equivalent to try and recover the partition.
· If it does see the partition (or if you recovered it) try and read the files.
· If not, back to Norton Disk Doctor.
· If this does not work, it's time for Ontrack or other data recovery service (if the client will pay!). Good hunting!!
From: Karl DeGraff
The most successful methods I have used are:
1. Find a computer with the exact same operating system (Win 95, Win 98, etc.) that you can use as a surrogate host. This works best if the secondary IDE channel is unused, allowing the private use of that channel by the ailing drive, and usually eliminating the need of changing jumpers.
2. Go to the drive's manufacturer's Web site (or use a drive parameters database) to get the actual physical drive parameters.
3. Set the surrogate computer's BIOS parameters to expect the ailing drive and turn it off. Auto is the best initial setting. Make sure the second IDE channel is enabled and power management is off, at least for the hard drives.
4. Cable the ailing drive to the surrogate computer's secondary IDE channel using a reasonably long IDE cable (see reason for long cable below).
5. If the drive does not spin during power up when it should (note that some SCSI drives have delayed spin ups), take the drive, hold it in the fingertips of both hands (spider on a mirror style), and rotate the drive's casing around the disk platters inside suddenly (the reason for the long IDE cable). The most effective motion is to prepare by rotating slowly to a starting position where your fingers are turned "up toward" your chest as far as is comfortable for you wrists, then suddenly rotate "down out" from your chest as far as is comfortable, and then immediately snap back to the original position. This technique works by moving the casing with respect to the platters based on the principle of inertia and will often allow a drive with "frozen" bearings to spin up one more time. Do not expect this technique to work twice!
6. If the drive does not spin up, see a drive/data recovery lab that has the ability to disassemble the drive to get at the platters and recover the data from them by using specialized clean room equipment. When performed by a qualified lab, this process is quite successful, but very expensive—backups are much cheaper! Choose the right lab, you usually only get one shot...
7. If the computer recognizes the drive, proceed on to recovering the data by any means you desire. Note that since the drive is not the boot drive and host operating system, all of the boot and operating system information are accessibl–e—no "in use" files!
8. If the computer does not recognize the drive, especially if set to Auto, go to the BIOS and set the drive parameters to the manufacturer specified values and reboot. If still no recognition, try adjusting the values for sector translation. There are several options for the primary translation type (Normal, LBA, Large, etc.), but please note that there may be other settings that also effect drive communications. These other settings usually have values of Yes/No. Some of these other settings are "large drive" (note there are many different names for this setting), "enhanced mode,” and "block mode.” The important thing is to try different combinations of any of the settings that effect hard drive communications for the second IDE channel. Hint, make a list of all of the possible combinations and check off each one as you try it.
9. Most important, try not to let anything (e.g., operating system or "fix-it" programs) mess with the disk contents until you have exhausted all other avenues of access. These programs are great, but should be reserved as the first line of defense against software corruption and the last resort for hardware corruption. If your problem is a hardware issue, these programs will usually "finish the job" in terms of denying you the possibility of recovering you data. Only use them AFTER the hardware problem has been corrected.
From: Dan Miley
I've had this happen before, and one thing that worked for me involved the following:
The Hard Disk Assembly (HDA) is usually separate from the IDE controller board. If the controller board is the bad part, the data is still good, you just cannot get to it. The symptoms for this are: Disk not spinning up at all, "drive not found," or "no boot disk available" type messages.
I've swapped the data module (HDA) from the bad drive controller to a good replacement drive. Usually it's just 4-6 screws and a couple small cables. Use static care procedures as always when working with computer parts.
If the data is good, send the new HDA and bad board back to be fixed, put the good drive (with original data) back in, reboot, and away you go.
From: Jack Ho
· First of all, get yourself a Win95/98 startup disk and an emergency boot disk from your favorite virus-scanning software and disk-repairing programs.
· Second, note the number of drives in the system and reboot the machine. When it boots up, make sure you can hear the all drives spin up. If the spinning sounds are confusing, you may have to open up the case.
· If any of the drives didn't spin, turn off the PC and take the computer case off. Carefully unplug the drive cables and power cables and reconnect them. Then power up the system. If the drives still do not spin, swap the power cables and try again. If they still do not spin, then you know for sure those drives are dead. To retrieve data from these drives, you may have to take them to a nearby data recovery center and be prepared to spend some bucks. If they spin after you swap the cables, then you've got power problems, and you need to replace the power supply on the system.
· If the drive is spinning but the system does not recognize it, such as "invalid drive specification" or "disk 0" errors, cold boot the machine and enter CMOS setup. Make sure the disk controller (whether it is IDE or SCSI) is enabled. Set it to AutoDetect if it is an IDE drive. Set the correct SCSI options (by entering the appropriate SCSI utility) if it is a SCSI drive. Since the system was working before, I assume the SCSI IDs and master/slave parameters are correct. After the correct options are set, reboot the system. For an IDE drive, if the system still does not recognize it, manually enter the drive parameters in the CMOS set up and reboot again. If the system has a CD-ROM drive, note if it was being recognized by the system. If the system does not recognize both hard drives and CD-ROM drives, take the computer case off and replace the IDE cables (or SCSI cables if they are SCSI drives). Note any broken pins when you replace the cables. If there are any broken pins, you may have to replace the drives or motherboard.
· After you've replaced the cables, if the drives are still not being recognized, the drives may be bad. If you have a spare working drive, plug it in. If it works, then you know the other drives are bad: either a severe virus has contaminated the drives such that the drive parameters are overwritten, or there are physical errors with the drives. If the system does not even recognize your spare working drive, then the disk controller is bad and needs to be replaced.
· If the system recognizes the drive but does not boot up your OS, cold boot your system from a bootable virus ERD and do a complete scan of the failed drive. Repair any corrupted master boot records if possible. If the virus-scanning disk does not find any virus, cold boot the system with a bootable ERD from your favorite disk repairing software such as Norton Disk Doctor. If this still does not help, but you are able to access the data from a floppy boot disk, you can recover the system by backing up all your data and reinstalling the OS on the hard drive. If the failed drive can’t be accessed from a boot floppy and is not repairable by any "disk doctor" programs, take it to a data recovery center.
From: Robert K. Kuhn
Since you did not state what kind of hard drive this is (MFM, RLL, SCSI, ESDI, IDE/EIDE), I'm going to assume IDE/EIDE.
An "Invalid Drive Type" error usually means that the wrong drive type has been selected in CMOS. I am also going to assume that the BIOS/CMOS supports this hard drive size (some older BIOS’s required a third party software patch; drives that were 500 MB and larger for instance...). If Auto Detect does not work or if the BIOS/CMOS setup does not have an Auto Detect feature, then I would do as follows:
1. Verify that the drive is spinning up and that all the cables are hooked up properly.
2. I would then verify that the drive itself is configured/jumpered correctly (master/slave/single drive). Most of your current IDE/EIDE drives have the jumper setting on the drive itself, which makes it nice. Though some of the older ones do not, which forces you to call their tech support or search their Web site for jumper configuration.
3. If I had access to another computer, I would either try swapping out the cable to see if I had a bad cable or I would just simply install the "bad" drive into the other computer and see if the BIOS/CMOS detects the drive. If it does not, then chances are very good that the drive is kaput. However, if the other computer does see the drive and I am able to boot up with it, then I have to assume that there's a problem with the other computer's IDE/EIDE controller. One last attempt would be to find the geometry of the drive (cylinders, heads, sectors) and add them in manually. If it booted fine with the other computer, the geometry can be copied from there. Otherwise, a call to the vendor or a search on their Web site would be order. If the hard drive controller is found to be bad, depending on the motherboard (going with the assumption that it has an onboard controller with both a primary and secondary controller), I would check the CMOS to make sure that the IDE controller(s) were enabled. Sometimes you can boot from the secondary IDE/EIDE controller, so I would try that too. If it boots, great! Time for a new motherboard or perhaps just purchase a new controller and disabling the onboard controller. But I would seriously consider getting a new motherboard when budget allows.
4. If I only had the one computer, then I would have to search for a known good hard drive (and cable) that the BIOS supports. Then if it too does not boot, then I would have to guess it's something with the
controller/motherboard. If it does boot, then I would have lean towards a bad drive.
5. Sometimes with an "Invalid Drive Type", you can actually boot with a floppy (assuming that the drive is not an NTFS, HPFS, LINUX, Novell NetWare or some other format....) and then access the hard drive. If
this can be done, this might be one way to back up any data. You can set up the "bad" drive as "slave" and then with a new drive formatted with whatever format is needed, copy over whatever data that can be read on the "bad" drive.
Back in the good old days, when we had a drive that went beyond the 1024 cylinders (which is 99.99 percent of all the IDE/EDIE drives made since 1992 and on), we had to "trick" the BIOS/CMOS. This was done by taking the cylinders, dividing the number in half, and then doubling the heads:
Example: 1138 cylinders, 8 heads, 63 sectors–s—this would translate to 569 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors.
I would try this trick as perhaps my last resort. But this was used/done on 386/486 machines back in the late 1980s to early 1990s.
One last attempt, and I doubt that it will work but it's worth a shot, would be to get Symantec's Ghost or PowerQuest's Drive Image. A trial copy can be downloaded from their site. See if a drive-to-drive image
can be made (from the old "bad" drive to the "new" replacement drive). However, Ghost and Drive Image must be able to read the "bad" drive's partition. One could look into a sector-by-sector copying tool. Back in the late 80s, I had one but for the life of me can't remember who wrote it. But I remember it was shareware. Gibson research, perhaps (the makers of SpinWrite, an excellent utility for it's time...)
If the data is that important (mission critical), a drive recovery center would have to deal with it. But be prepared to pay for it! We've had to use a local data recovery center (Hard Disks Only) and Gibson Research in the past to rebuild a bad drive. Not cheap but would have cost us more had we not been able to recover the data. Gibson Research is perhaps the best out of the two we've dealt with.
Some other things to consider include that a bad power supply can also cause a hard drive not to boot (not allowing it to spin up to full RPM), the amperage required to spin the motor is more than what the motherboard draws/needs even if it has a full bus. Also, I've even seen some ISA, PCI, and AGP cards cause conflicts with onboard IDE/EIDE controllers (usually in the form of IRQ and/or memory address). Though these are usually funky-specialized boards, I have seen it happen.
Again, I am assuming that the drive is an IDE/EIDE. If it's an MFM, RLL, ESDI or SCSI, then the tactics would differ slightly as each are set up and controlled differently. But since IDE/EIDE is perhaps the popular and most used drive, I am going to assume that is the drive.
From: Jim Davison
Since you did not state IDE/SCSI, I will assume IDE. I will also assume that drive is not using a bios modifier like those used to make older motherboards support larger drives. (I have seen situations where users tried to enter drive specks in setup for SCSI drives).
I would use the following steps even considering that you state the user had "Tried" to manually enter the settings in setup and also tried auto. The user may not know what they are doing. I also would not trust the error codes. I would assume the error codes are only letting us know there is a problem but would not trust the codes to give an accurate description of what the problem is.
1. In setup, Try IDE Auto Detect to see if the bios can even see the drive.
If yes, then I would use that setting and everything should be OK.
If yes, and the drive still does not boot, I would use fdisk/mbr in case the Master boot record was destroyed.
If no, then I would go to step 2.
2. Open the box and check all power and data cables.
(I have seen Molex type power connectors lose a connection intermittently even if they are plugged in tightly) you need to wiggle them around. (I have also seen one case where the data cable came loose when the computer was moved).
If cables were the problem, then you should be okay now.
If you still have a problem, go to step 3.
3. Other Drives are bad and interfering with the boot disk
In case anything else is sharing the IDE bus with the drive, e.g., a CD-ROM, then disconnect anything that is also connected to the IDE bus and recheck the Master/Slave settings if necessary and try again.
4. Possibly a faster way to check if the problem is the drive or something else
Remove the drive and plug it into another computer and see if the other computer can detect the drive. If yes, then the problem is a cable, motherboard, etc. on the computer, so go to step 5.
5. CMOS or Flash problem
Put the drive or at least a drive back on the computer with the problem. Go to setup and reload the bios from defaults and then redo the settings and save. Then try the IDE auto detect. If this does not work and your system has flash upgrades, then reload the flash. Might as well check for upgrades before refreshing. After refreshing, then again reload the defaults and save settings. Reboot into setup and try the auto detects again.
If the BIOS can now see the drive but the drive still does not boot, then you may need to reload the OS or at least replace the necessary drivers.
If the thing still is not working, then it is most likely a defective drive and you will need to decide how badly you need the data on the drive. If you need the data, then I would send the drive to a data recovery lab that can extract the data from a dead drive and save the data to a tape, CD, HD, etc. This can be expensive but may be worth it.
From: Ron Charity
A trick I was told that sometimes works is to remove the drive from the PC (leave power and data connected), lean it on its side and attempt reboots.
From: Phil Murphy
First thing I would do is to check the BIOS to make the sure the disk is set to Auto and doesn't have any settings in it. Then I would reboot the computer using the Win95/98 Setup disk and run fdisk to check to make sure that there are partitions visible. If there are no partitions visible, then I would have to assume that the data on the drive has departed. Next, if I do see a partition, then I will exit fdisk and go right the C drive. I would run a directory on it to see if all of the files are intact. If they have strange names and numbers, then the drive has suffered a serious malfunction and the data is not retrievable. If the directory appears to be in good shape, then I would use Drive Image to make a image file of the hard drive and move it to either a zip disk or a CD-ROM, for the next time this happens.
From: Shawn Cole
· Get a second Hard Drive larger than the current broke or fairly non-functioning one.
· Make Disk #1 OLD Drive Slave and the new one Master because you want the new one to become your Primary Boot Drive.
· Format and FDISK the New Drive into one or two partitions. I do two for personal reasons, Format c: so it's bootable.
· Go buy a program called LOST & FOUND V1.0 from www.necx.com under software, disk utilities from the company POWERQUESTCORPORATION found at
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