computer suddenly wont detect hdd at all

[nugget]

Hi everyone,
I have a compaq armada 1592dt(portable) and i cannot seem to get the thing to boot up. It gives me a similar prompt to as if i had a floppy in the drive saying that it is an invalid system disk. it does this even though there is no floppy in it. I ran fdisk (through a win95 start disk)and it then says that there are no fixed disks present!!!
I cant seem to get into the bios to run the hdd detector either. I am pretty sure that the keypress for this machine is f10 so no luck there either.
Any help that anyone could give me would be much appreciated. Thankyou
Dave

 

[edfair]

What was the operating system. There are detection problems between some versions.
On some desktops the f10 is only active while the cursor is flashing in the upper right corner. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Shad007]

You probably can't get into F10 as on most of the older compaqs the 'bios' as such was held on a 'Diagnostic partition' (about 12-30mbs) which was the first partition on your HDD...ie..you won't see the F10 function if the diagnostic partition isn't there. What you need to do is visit the compaq site and see if you can obtain the diagnostic disks for your model laptop (Better still, if you have a restore cd use that as it will replace the diagnostic partition).... Unfortunately it does look like your hdd has been wiped (confirm this by putting a win98 bootdisk in your floppy drive and trying to change to C: once booted).

 

[tesa]

somebody I know has the same problem, her computer was working properly for 2 yrs and suddenly the bios stopped detecting the hdd... I think the info is still there,I want to recover it... I tried to put this faulty hdd in other computers and its not detected by their bios. I I put a good hdd in her computer and its is easily recognized by the bios... so I think this hdd is "dead", but I still hope I can read the info somehow, any suggestions?... also, why does this happen?

thanks
tesa

 

[edfair]

The HD is probably gone to all but data recovery companies. Anything that interferes with the spinup or reading will cause it. Hard drives are made to fail. Mid 80s drives were rated at 20K hours MTBF which means half failed sooner, half later. And the 20K was a SWAG. Seagate had some that had problems getting past the 5000 hour mark. Then there was an escallation to 100K and 200K mtbf. This of course was publicised before the first drive of the series passed 6 months of service. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.