HD Dead? Am i SOL?

[Ksi01]

Hello HardForum! I've been searching for an issue that i just had with my 3 year old hard drive in Google and i found out this forum.

About 3 days ago i was working normally on my desktop PC, when suddenly everything froze and a blue screen message came up from Windows. When i rebooted my pc i got a message that the Windows installation needed repair. I thought that maybe it was a normal crash, so i tried to repair the windows install with my windows DVD.

Issue was that the repair tool failed every time, and what i noticed in the CMD prompt from windows install was that the drive that had my OS did not show up at all.

I tried to change ports/ SATA cables/ power cables, and nothing worked. Something that i noticed though was that the drive would sometimes be visible at the BIOS screen, but this was at random.

Any way, i tried to mount the HD on my brother's PC. Same stuff. The drive would sometimes get recognized at BIOS but other times no. In Windows (in my brother's pc) the device manager / disc manager would show up the HD as 'UNKOWN' with no visible capacity. When i tried to right click> intialize the HD, it would say that it was not able to write to it.

So i read in some forums that i should download the seagate utility for MS DOS to diagnose my HD. I created a boot disk with the utility.

Then i tried to reebot the pc until the drive would get recognized at BIOS and then boot it up with the utility.
The issue is, when the Seagate tool tried to access my drive (and get in the utility screen) i would get a loop message with the following. (lol dirty monitor i know)

InitDiskError reading partition table drive 00 sector 00 and then it would loop until, after about 30 minutes, the PC would reboot automatically.

So now i'm just wondering. Am i out of options? Are there any other methods that i could try just to recover my info? I read that maybe trying to use Linux or so would give me a chance to recover it.

 

[Gandalf1959]

Hello HardForum! I've been searching for an issue that i just had with my 3 year old hard drive in Google and i found out this forum.

About 3 days ago i was working normally on my desktop PC, when suddenly everything froze and a blue screen message came up from Windows. When i rebooted my pc i got a message that the Windows installation needed repair. I thought that maybe it was a normal crash, so i tried to repair the windows install with my windows DVD.

Issue was that the repair tool failed every time, and what i noticed in the CMD prompt from windows install was that the drive that had my OS did not show up at all.

I tried to change ports/ SATA cables/ power cables, and nothing worked. Something that i noticed though was that the drive would sometimes be visible at the BIOS screen, but this was at random.

Any way, i tried to mount the HD on my brother's PC. Same stuff. The drive would sometimes get recognized at BIOS but other times no. In Windows (in my brother's pc) the device manager / disc manager would show up the HD as 'UNKOWN' with no visible capacity. When i tried to right click> intialize the HD, it would say that it was not able to write to it.

So i read in some forums that i should download the seagate utility for MS DOS to diagnose my HD. I created a boot disk with the utility.

Then i tried to reebot the pc until the drive would get recognized at BIOS and then boot it up with the utility.
The issue is, when the Seagate tool tried to access my drive (and get in the utility screen) i would get a loop message with the following. (lol dirty monitor i know)

InitDiskError reading partition table drive 00 sector 00 and then it would loop until, after about 30 minutes, the PC would reboot automatically.

So now i'm just wondering. Am i out of options? Are there any other methods that i could try just to recover my info? I read that maybe trying to use Linux or so would give me a chance to recover it.

Yes. You are SOL. Now is a good time to buy an SSD and a SATA to USB cable.