HD failure?

[iamjd]

I left my computer on and come home hours later to find that it is not running the OS (perhaps it restarted) and has a message saying, "Restart and select proper boot device
or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key."

I found that my HD isn't being recognized. I tried using different cables/power cords from power supply. Nothing is working to get it to be recognized. In the BIOS, it does not appear.

I then tried attaching it as a slave HD to my other computer. It was recognized but S.M.A.R.T. said it is "capable" but failed. I don't know what that means.

I am not sure what steps to take next. The BIOS on the other computer recognizes it as a slave, but does not show up when the OS is running.

 

[garebo]

I would venture to guess that the drive is kaput, or dead.
Smart, from what i think you said, pretty much told you that the drive is capable in that it had the technology to be recognized by smart technology, but that the drive has failed, and i do believe that smart is telling you the drive has failed.
How old is the drive?
I, personally, would get a win98 boot disk, set my bios to boot from floppy, boot to floppy, then try and run fdisk.
What you can do is take off all existing ide cables and drives from your motherboard and just hook this one bad h drive as master on the primary motherboard connector. Have just the one hard drive, no other hard drives or cdrom, dvd, nothing, just the one drive.
Put win98 boot disk in and turn on computer, go into bios and see if you can get the bios to recognize the h drive.
Also set bios to boot from floppy and let it boot to floppy and then try fdisk.
If you cant get anywhere with this then the drive is likely dead.
You can also try one other thing. Go to the website for the mfgr of your hard drive and download their diagnostics that goes onto a floppy disk. Then, when you boot with win98 floppy, you can run the diagnostics as well.




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