Dead drive?

[DeusSteve]

I have a 120 GB Western Digital harddrive that was in one computer (computer A from now on). Out of nowhere it(computer A) does not start up. I get a "Cannot find bootdisk error". I checked all the obvious things like boot order and all that stuff. I decided that the bootsector of the disk was bad. I tried a Windows (2000 Pro) repair installation but it said that there was no valid Windows OS installed. It said that I would have to format and reinstall.

Normally I would be fine doing this, but the hard disk has vital business information that I need to get off of it and I would really not like to spend gobs of money at some Data-Recovery place. So I plugged the hard drive of Computer A into Computer B as the slave drive. Everything boots normal and I go to My Computer to discover that it does now show the hard drive from Computer A. I checked the device manager and it sees both hard drives (from computers A and B) and says both are working properly. I opened up Computer Management from the Administrative Tools of the Control Panel and went to manage disks. There it just showed the hard drive from computer B.

Is there any way that I can get to the information on the hard drive from Computer A without taking it to a data recovery place? I quite short on cash so...
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[pddxr]

hmm.. doesn't sound good..

Assuming first that the drive is not the problem.

I'd try a new ribbon
Check the jumper settings
Make sure that the bois is set properly for your configuration
Make sure that your version of the motherboard bios supports a drive that big

I actually had a 80gig drive work for a while on a bios rev that didn't support a drive that big and then it just stopped working. Flashing the bios was my last thought but it fixed the problem.

Hope some of this helps

 

[Kofy]

you might try looking for some type of data recovery program like GetDataBackNTFS or GetDataBack for Fat from runtime.org I dont know if they have trial-ware or not.. you might also ask around on Kazaa to see if anyone there can help you out with finding prog.

 

[DeusSteve]

How can I use one of those programs if I can't see the drive?

 

[SYAR2003]

Datarecovery programs don work through drive letters .
They access the partitions , and the raw space on the disk .

 

[nato308]

If the hard drive from computer A is spinning up okay, the controller board for the drive may have gone south. What I have done before to recover data in this situation is to buy an identical drive and swap boards long enough to recover data, erase the drive, then contact the drive maker for a replacement if it is still under warranty. Caution, just because the drives have identical drive model numbers does not mean they have the same controller boards.

 

[mainegeek]

DeusSteve,
I use this often and it works well. You have to pay for it though.

http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm

 

[DeusSteve]

Thanks for the suggestions, but none worked. I ended up trying to format it and it said it could not write to the drive. I just ended up buying a new hard drive. I decided that the data wasn't worth a couple hundred bucks to get saved.
Thanks though.