Hard Drive has the heebyjeebies

[Asazman]

While I was out of town, my father's employee's computer went on the fritz (the hard drive to be more specific). It would no longer boot to the hard drive. He gets the error "CAN NOT BOOT TO DISK PLEASE REPLACE" or something like that. The hard drive is being detected by the BIOS, it just can't be booted from. He didn't change anything and I have tried the drive on a couple other computers with the same result.

I can't even access the drive through windows, but when I go into the disk manager it says that it is unallocated...

Downloaded the trial version of "GetDataBack" and it was able to read the hard drive and access all the files, but I still can't boot from it....

He needs his computer up and running tomorrow morning by 10:30AM so I need to get this fixed tonight, one way or another. I have an 80GB hard drive that has windowsxp on it that he could use, however his computer is an AMD K6-2 550Mhz hard drive with 400MB of SDRAM, and upon trying to boot from the hard drive (which was detected to my amazement) it froze before it got to the windows boot logo.

Any suggestions would be great. Thanks everyone!

 

[Snugglebear]

That would most likely a fried partition table. There are a few PT repair utils in the FAQ. Just be aware there may be more issues you run into after you fix the PT. I would run the manufacturer utilities on the drive overnight to check for any hardware failures in the unit to be on the safe side. Actually, running memtest86+ and Prime95 to check for corruption problems outside the disk would be advisable, too, but I don't think you have the time for it.