Hard Drive not recognized

[gadget3302]

This is a tricky one. I am building a newish computer. I bought a Gigabyte GA-K8U motherboard with a AMD sempron 64 3000+ processor. I already had a maxtor 60 GB AT D740X-6l from a working machine. I setup the computer, installed windows xp pro, and got everything running. The MOBO comes with this program Xpress Recovery which backs-up the computer onto a hidden partition on the hard drive. I ran this program upon boot-up to create the Image file. The back up went fine. I restarted the computer and Now the Bios no longer recognizes the hard drive. I Talked with Gigabyte and they insist its the hard drive. Maxtor had no decent advice. I have tried this hard drive in other computers with the same results. What can be done. I do not think the hard drive is defective. Upon boot up I can hear and feel it spinning. I need advice. Please help.

Is there a way to format and unrecognized hard drive?...

Thanks in advance
Brian

 

[gadget3302]

Oh, also I have tried another hard drive on the motherboard and it worked fine so the controler is okay on the Mobo.

 

[franklin97355]

Sounds like the program you ran hosed the OS install. I would try removing all partitions and reinstalling windows. If that works I wouldn't run that program a second time.

 

[KevinADC]

It's strange the MOBO can't even recognize the HDD in the BIOS. Sounds like the HDD firmware has been corrupted, erased or damaged.

See if you can slave the drive to another one and remove all partitions and data.

 

[electronicsfreak]

Dont always believe gigabyte, my past experiences with there tech support were not to great.

 

[gadget3302]

KevinADC is there a way to slave to another hard drive without the slave being recognized by the bios?

 

[KevinADC]

you can try manually setting up the hard drive in the BIOS. Look on the HDD and see if there is a sticker with cylinders/heads/sectors (C/H/S) info and/or other info about the hard drive you can use to manually set it up in the BIOS. If that still doesn't work (it might take a few attempts to get it set up manually), and the hard drive just refuses to work, I would have to assume its damaged.

 

[gadget3302]

Thanks guys for all your help.

 

[danomac]

I had this problem with my gigabyte motherboard, and it was the jumper settings on the drive. It was originally set to CS (Cable Select) and no matter what I did it wouldn't detect. I jumpered it to master and had no problems with it after that.

 

[kmcferrin]

You might try downloading the eval version of Stellar Phoenix recovery software to see if there's still any data there that you can get at. Of course, doing so would require that you slave that disk to a bootable system.

I wonder if that backup software didn't hose the OS or partition table. Did you need to have free, unpartitioned space on the disk before running the backup? If so, did you?

Also, keep in mind that just because you can hear/feel a disk spin up doesn't mean that it is dead.

 

[gadget3302]

kmcferrin would'nt the hard drive still be detected if the partition table was dameged though?

 

[kmcferrin]

Sorry, I must have missed the part about the BIOS no longer seeing a drive there. You could hook it up, but it probably wouldn't be seen. Did you try manually setting the CHS info manually in the BIOS?

 

[gadget3302]

Yes I have tried a manual setting, with no better results. Whats worse is the warranty ran out like 4 months ago.

 

[jayjaykay]

When I have prbs like this I try this. grap yourself a copy of linux knoppix

http://www.knoppix.net,(

if you havent already got one) boot it up with your hard drive and see if it is accessible, if it is you can simply reformat it, or put your dodgy hard drive into a pc running a healthy windows system, set the drive as a slave and try the linux boot up again. If you can then see it you can reformat. It is quite common not to be able to see a drive under windows if the particion table is stuffed, it will quite often be accesible under linux.

Jim

 

[danomac]

gadget3302: Talk to Maxtor. They did fix my drive 3-4 months after the warranty ran out, but I was without the drive for a while. This may depend on the rep you talk to though.

 

[KevinADC]

It is quite common not to be able to see a drive under windows

I wouldn't call that common, but it happens.

I restarted the computer and Now the Bios no longer recognizes the hard drive

anyway, thats not the problem jayjaykay, the HDD is not being picked up by the BIOS as the OP stated in his/her opening post.

Getting a copy of Knoppix is still a very good suggestion but I doubt it will resolve this problem.