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Is this HD dead?

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Weaksauce
Joined
Sep 8, 2004
Messages
107
Hi, a friend gave me his computer to try and figure out why it wasn't booting up and I have a question about that. I tried booting on his computer and in the bios there was no ide drive at all, just the floppy and the cd-rom.

The message when I didn't go into bios was:

Searching for Boot Record From Floppy... Not Found
Searching for Boot Record From CDROM... Not Found
Searching for Boot Record From SCSI... Not Found

Boot Failure
Insert Boot Diskette
Press any key when ready...


I then disconnected the drive and tried connecting it to another pc and during boot up it said "primary disk failure." Ok, so I conclude that the hard drive has serious issues if it's not dead altogether.
I have a few questions: are there any other things I can do to see if the drive is dead? Is there any way to retreive the data that's on the drive?

Thanks.

It's a 40GB Maxtor.
 
Set the jumper to master if it's not already. If you can't get the BIOS to recognize the drive, it's probably dead.
 
Jumper is set to master. It was working fine for him yesterday but just wouldn't boot up today.
How would it just die like that?
 
Probably just something fried/failed in the drive for some reason when he powered it up this morning.
 
try a different HD. If that works, then it is the hard drive. Otherwise, you can try removing all the jumpers.
 
Im assuming you cant see the drive at all in the BIOS. But if you can, is your boot sequence correct? Ie..IDE first?
 
Yeah, and I just tried another hd on that pc so it's not the mobo or anything, it must be the hd that's messed up. I'll try and set it to slave, hook it up to my own rig and see if I can get it to work at all.
But it doesn't show up in the bios at all.
 
well if you can slave it, at least you may get the data. GL!
 
it may sound stupid, but, put in another drive and get the system running, then

plug in the original drive, but physically have the thing upside down to its previous orientation. Occasionally it'll run for a little while and let you salvage data. (you'd think i'm kidding...)
 
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