Dead or just not formatted correctly?

[Black-Tom]

Hey all, I have a 40 Gigabyte Maxtor ide drive that I cannot get my computer to see for the life of me. I have no idea whether it still works or not, but I don't really know much about hardrives.

What I know: its connected using a working ide cable, to an open channel on my mobo. The Bios does not have the ports disabled as far as I know, since I don't think I can turn them off, and because the other one has a working dvd ram drive connected. When I boot up the computer, with the molex connection and the cable in place, I can feel and hear that the drive is indeed powering up.

What I need to know: Do I need to format the drive so that my computer can see it? Or is it purely just dead?

Thanks in advance!

[Blue Fox]

Does the BIOS recognize it?

[DonDon]

Are you having trouble seeing it from a regular windoz explorer window, or the disk managment window? Also, in device manager, can you see it there under hard drives?

And what I always preach is download the diagnostics from the manufacturers website, Seagate in this case, in the support section. I recommend getting the dos version and run the long test on the drive and see if you get any errors.

Don

[Black-Tom]

The Bios doesn't see it at all, so I don't think I can run any diagnostics on it. I would assume that means it is dead?

[Mav451]

BIOS should see it regardless of formatting. Hell, if it sees it and you have the wrong jumper set on it, at least BIOS flips out (and you can promptly fix it). But if BIOS isn't even responding and recognizing it...I don't know what to say.

[DonDon]

Yep, it sounds pretty dead if the bios aint seeing it.

It's only a 40 gig drive. Time to move on. ;)

Don

[Black-Tom]

Yeah... sounds like it. I was just hoping to get a little more space for movies. Oh well. Thanks guys!