Two Hard Drives Went Dead at once

[searcherrr]

I'm down in the New Orleans area. When I evacuated for Hurricane Katrina I backed up my data drive to an external enclosure. I then unplugged my desktop and brought it and my external enclosure with me on the evac trip. Almost a month later I plugged my desktop back in to find out that neither hard drive on the Primary IDE (master and slave) channel are being recognized by the BIOS. I'm having a hard time believing that both drives are bad. They are both Seagate drives (one IDE; one SATA). I bought another external enclosure to put the IDE one into to test it out on my laptop. I put it all together and installed the external enclosure USB software drivers and turned it on, plugged it into the laptop, and NOTHING happens. While I'm pretty sure this means that the drive is really bad, I'm still doubting it wondering if the external enclosure I just bought may not be compatible with my laptop for some reason. My next test is to put another known working hard drive into the new external enclosure and see if it works. If it does, this is what I'm poised with:

How do I get my data off the two bad drives? I know the data has to still be there. The desktop didn't go thru any kind of abrupt vibrations or dropping, so I really don't understand why both drives would've gone bad. Possibly a surge of power after turning it on for the first time in over a month? If I bring the drives over to a data retrieval specialist how are they even going to interface with the drives to get the data off if they won't even be recognized by the bios?

Hope someone can help me.

 

[edfair]

Do you have autodetect as an option in CMOS setup? Is it possible that the CMOS battery died and the BIOS is using the default settings of no hard drives?

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

 

[searcherrr]

If that were the case then why would it recognize the CD-ROM drive on the Secondary channel? Plus I did a "SEARCH FOR ALL DRIVES" function in the BIOS menu and it comes up with NOTHING every time. Though would a fading bios battery cause this type of problem maybe? Its about 5 years old; so you think I should replace it and just see?

 

[edfair]

Batteries going dead create some wierd problems. But the secondary channel seeing things changes the diagnostic steps.
I would change the battery then use the clear function to clean the CMOS then reset the variables.
Next would be to swap the CDROM cable to one of the hard drives (selected as master) to eliminate the possibility that the primary cable was bad and verify that the drive was capable of being seen through one channel.
It is unlikely that both went bad, but it has happened. I would put the odds at being higher that the M/B has failed than both drives failing at the same time. But not enough to put money on it.

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

 

[garebo]

As edfair already said, it could be the motherboard. It may have been hit by a power issue, brown-out or surge, either one.

I doubt its the battery but a battery tester will tell you what voltage its running at. Its supposed to be at or near 3 volts. YOu can get them now at the $1 store.

If the drives arent recognized then i dont think there is a program around to get your data from them. If you can get a drive recognized then "get data back" would be the program to use, you can google it.

Reading all this i cant help but think either the drives got damaged in transit, although i certainly believe you protected them, so i could be dead wrong on that. Maybe someone picked up your pc or somehow they got dropped or something when you werent around? Or maybe they got hit by a power surge initially or even when you plugged them in again. A power surge can kill a hard drive fast and a brown-out is worse. These can happen in less than a blink of an eye so you often cant see them happen. When you are up and running again, can i suggest you never plug a pc into a wall socket, always have a UPS to plug into. These will prevent damage due to power surges,and worse, brown-outs. And they are cheap to buy these days.

Only other thing i can suggest is to try and get another hard drive the same as what you have and swap the pcb boards to try and get your data back. But this has its down side as you could fry the pcb board and you are stuck with another dead hard drive. I havent done that yet with a larger hard drive, only with smaller ones, and success rate is about 50%.


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[BaudKarma]

I like edfairs suggestion. If your system is detecting the CDROM on the secondary channel, then unplug the IDE cable from the CD and plug it into one of your hard drives. Make sure the jumpers are set appropriately, etc. That should help you determine whether the problem is the drive or a cable/IDE channel problem.

Are your drives spinning up? When you turn the power on, can you feel them vibrating a little as the platters start to spin? Or are they totally dead?


I try not to let my ignorance prevent me from offering a strong opinion.

 

[searcherrr]

I will try the IDE cable swap thing, but the only thing that makes me think that won't do anything (like the CMOS battery swap not doing anything either; betting) is that the drive does spin up in the external enclosure I bought. It just won't show up in XP on my laptop when I plug it in via the USB port. Repeating: I have 1 of the suspected bad hard drives in an external enclosure now and when I plug that enclosure into the usb port of my laptop it spins up but does not show up as an available drive letter.
I think I'm going to test that the external enclosure does work with my laptop by putting in an known GOOD working Hard Drive. If that doesn't work, then I'll know the enclosure test is not a valid one to use and proceed with the IDE cable. It'll be a couple days before we know anything for sure cause I have to go on a trip here in a bit. Thanks for all the good suggestions. I will get back on here and let ya'll know what up.

 

[searcherrr]

Well, I think I may have figured it out. I put the HD that was in the external enclosure in my sister's PC and looked at the BIOS and when I did it caused the other HD she already had in there not to register on that Primary channel. As soon as I took it out and put my sister's other HD back in immediately both her HD's showed again in the BIOS. I think that it may be just 1 drive that is bad, yet its causing a malfunction on the whole channel that blocks the use of the other drive, but what doesn't make sense about that theory in this case is that the other drive on my PC is a SATA drive and uses its own card. Ugg its nearly 4 AM. I need sleep. I'll figure this out another day.

 

[edfair]

One at a time into the secondary to see if they can identify singly, then into the secondary with the CD to see which one is clobbering the channel.
It is quite possible that one went bad then took the second out. I've had it happen a couple of times.

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

 

[searcherrr]

Well I had to try something new before I left on my trip or else I would've actually been thinking about this on the road. Turns out my SATA (Seagate Baracudda) drive is still working and that its my Seagate IDE ST36530A drive that is funked. With the ST36530A in it as you say "clobbers" the channel and with it out the SATA drive is recognized. Though I just realized as I put it back together that I should've still tested the primary channel with the Cd-ROM and/or cable swap as well, cause I'm unaware of why the IDE Primary channel would block the SATA drive from showing up due to the SATA drive having its own controller card n stuff. Can someone explain that?
I think though its important to still get that primary channel test done though cause it could've been what made my drive go bad. It isn't that old either.

The good news is that my SATA drive was my DATA drive (HA), so all I lost was the OS and all installed programs, but I either have them all or can download a lot of them again to rebuild. The only thing that sucks is that I think I hadn't moved my .wab (outlook express address book) over to the DATA drive so I'll have to rebuild that from emails. lol

 

[edfair]

When you get the system back together you may want to dump your address book to floppy. Gives you a fast way to get email back up and running on another machine.
And store it as CSV if that is an option.

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