Laptop HDD not detected

[goofaholix]

I have a Toshiba 4060XCDT, it was working fine until today.

Now there is no hard drive detected, the Bios shows "No hard drive" I can't do anything in the bios to prompt some change in that, many of the options you expect in the desktop bios are not there, i can't even select the the line that says "no hard drive"

Booting from a floppy then running fdisk does not detect a hard drive.

I guess I'm going to have to open it up and take a look inside, but hardware is not my thing. Any advice on what i shou;d do? Any links to toshiba technical info for this machine?

Thanks.

 

[goofaholix]

I have found the hard drive, I've removed it and re-inserted it checking that it is connected securely several times with no improvement.

What next?

 

[edfair]

options are:
1) zero fill and fdisk if zero fill cleared bootstrap
2) manufacturers diagnostics
3) recovery service for anything valuable
or
4) scrap it

1 & 2 wipe out data and eliminate possibility of step 3

Ed Fair
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[0105Quircus]

Is the BIOS set to auto-detect the Hard Drive??

 

[goofaholix]

I assume so, as there is no way in the bios to manually do it, there are far fewer options than in a desktop bios