Hard drive spins but cant acess it

[vbsaltydog]

I have a western digital 250Gb HD that has crashed. If I try to boot to it then the bios doesnt find it or it does find it but says no os. I naturally tried to use it as a slave drive to gain access to the data by switching the jumper and adding it internally. Not only does this not work but it causes the system to not see my primary HD either. Next, I tried using the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic Utilities on it by booting to the lifeguard floppy and testing the HD. Data Lifeguard does see the drive but when I run any tests on it, the HD activity light is solid and the test never completes/gives any error codes.

Any advise is appreciated.

 

[bithead9]

I've seen some very pervasize virii that infect the master boot record or the alternate track assignment table. It can make quite a mess. A low level format should recover the usefulness of the drive. But will not help you get the data. If you need the data, see if you can floppy boot and do an FDISK /MBR on that disk. Good luck. The FDSIK MBR will wipe out the MBR and any virius located there. Worth a try...