hard drive shows up in bios but not in windows.

[sonofshinobi]

I have a custom pc with a 250gb maxtor hard drive, it suddenly wouldnt boot up windows, it froze just before the xp loading screen.

I had been using this pc for almost four months prior to this incident and have not made any hardware changes at all in this time.

I tried two or three times to reboot but to no avail.

I started to run the pc with an old 80GB hitachi hard drive and installed xp pro on it. It works fine. But if i try to run the 250gb maxtor as a slave it doesnt appearin'my computer' even though it appears in bios.

Can the old maxtor drive be saved? What about what was stored on it?

 

[edfair]

This is usually an indication that the partition table is corrupted or other glitch in the drive identifier used by windows.
You might wnat to post in the general data recovery forum for helpful programs.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[wolluf]

Did you try recovery console?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654

If it will load, would show disk not entirely dead - run chkdsk /r.

If that runs to conclusion, run fixmbr and fixboot afterwards.

Or maxtor's diagnostic (powermax) to see if the drive is dead/dying?

Booting from the 80GB drive - does the 250 appear in disk management (run diskmgmt.msc)?

 

[CraigJConrad]

Slightly off-topic, but I have a lot of experience with the Maxtor 250GB drives -- mine were SATA, which probably is irrelevant. In any case, I had 7 or 8 drive replacements (under warranty) in as many months (and I had only purchased three of them, so you can see that many were repeats). A friend bought one the same day and it went dead within three months. In the course of working with Maxtor, I upgraded my power supply to 450W, added drive bay fans, and even replaced my system board, but the final two failures occured after all of these steps.

I hadn't had problems with my 200GB SATA drives on the same system (still have those drives running 24x7 in another system). I ended up getting rid of one, and putting the remaining two into a RAID 1 configuration, so I didn't have to worry as much about a failure. I am about to replace these with 400GB non-Maxtor drives (with 5 year warranty!).

My failures ranged in symptoms, although I think only one of them acted like you're describing. Most of them became evident when the system started getting REALLY slow, and the event log showed errors on the drive.

Best wishes ... Craig