Bios won't recognize HDD

[chezzam]

Have been setting up a new 80Gb Western Digital HDD for a friend. Original 8Gb drive had Win98SE. New HDD was set up as slave to the original master at this stage.

The plan was to copy the original Win98SE drive to one partition as a backup, use another for a fresh install of WIN XP HOME and the third for file storage.

I partitioned the new 80Gb HDD with Western Digital's DataLifeguard as follows:
1 x Primary drive (for Win XP)
2 x Extended Partition with 2 x Logical drives

When I rebooted to Win98SE I could only access the old HDD and the new HDD's primary partition. I ran Partition Magic 6.0 and discovered that DLG had made the extended (logical drives) partition's NTFS rather than FAT32 which I had wanted (not sure why the NTFS as I certainly didn't select it??!).

Tried to use Partition Magic to re-partition/format without success. Rebooted to DOS and tried FDISK but couldn't delete the NTFS partition so downloaded DELPART.EXE to do the job.

Disconnected the power to the old Win98SE HDD but left the drive cable plugged in. Ran DELPART.EXE and was able to re-partition the new HDD successfully using FDISK instead.

However, when I reconnected the power cable and tried to reboot the original 8Gb HDD the BIOS wouldn't recognize it. I have tried to boot it on my PC both, as slave and master, but have the same prob - BIOS just won't recognize it. If I run it as a slave, it won't even let my master boot!

Am thinking maybe running DELPART.EXE possible has something to do with this, but as the power cable was not connected at the time, I can't work out how! Anyone have any ideas on what has happened here? And can I recover the data from this 8Gb HDD? I just know my friend is not going to be happy when she finds out it's inaccessible!!!

Any help to save my neck ASAP would be muchly appreciated

 

[mainegeek]

chezzam,
The data on the 8gig is probably still intact.Powering the PC on with the data cable attached to the 8gig but no power plug may have screwed up the cmos settings.Take the 80gig out of the equation and hook the 8gig back in to the original cable and jumper settings so that it is setup the way it was before you started all of this. Boot up and go into the bios. Under cmos settings, set all 4 to NONE and then save and exit. Let it boot to the drive error message ie: "invalid system disk" or what ever.Then reboot again and go back into the bios. In cmos setting set the "primary master" to auto so that it can redetect the 8gig again. Then save and exit and see if it boots windows correctly.

Why are you creating a partition for Win98? Are you trying to create a "Dual Boot" system? or is this so she can get to her old data for use or transfer? This information is needed in order to help you prep the 80gig correctly.

 

[chezzam]

Tnx mainegeek for responding.

Doubtful it was a cmos setting problem as I had the same issue using 2 different pcs.

Some good news tho - after a couple of "technician's thumps" I finally managed to get the bios recognizing the corrupted hard drive. Booted it up as a slave to a good master, however it now presents as an empty drive. Now that I've got the bios recognizing the drive, I don't feel half as sick as I did before, but I am still stressing seriously over this dilemma!

Ran GETDATABACK with the corrupted drive hooked in as a slave on a different PC, but no luck. During the scan it said it recovered x amt of directories and xxxx amt files, but in the recovery step it says nothing is recoverable.

As I said before, the only thing I can think of is that I ran DELPART.EXE to fix NTFS partitions on a second HDD (hooked up as a slave to the drive I am having probs with). This drive - the one I am having probs with - had the HDD power cable unplugged but was set up as a master at the time and the IDE cable still connected. Could DELPART.EXE have run on this drive as well even without the power connected?

If so, now that bios is recognizing the HDD, any ideas on how to recover the partition/data? Have read that TESTDISK.EXE may help as it can undo DELPART.EXE's work. If so, what's the best way to use it? Or any other ideas on recovering the data? I did not format the drive, nor do anything else, after running DELPART.EXE.

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[mainegeek]

Could DELPART.EXE have run on this drive as well even without the power connected?"

No. The drive needs to be powered and spinning in order to read/write.

The power connector on the PCB may have been damaged from over stress or the jumper on the drive might be fitting loose.