Urgent - Sata drive no longer boots / shows in bios

[thomasquinn]

Long story short, my computer has been working fine, no hardware changes or anything like that. I was sitting at my computer and talking on Skype when it rebooted. When it started back up it no longer booted. I checked in the BIOS and it detects my IDE drive and my other SATA drive but for my system drive (SATA as well) it has a blank entry, no hard drive data and it doesn't say empty. Any ideas? This is driving me insane..

 

[thomasquinn]

Just another fact about this, even though it doesn't show me any information about the drive (Like I said, just shows a blank line and not WD or any size information) I can still select it to boot from. It gives me the "DISK BOOT FAILURE" error. It DOES have an OS installed. 2 actually.. XP and Ubuntu. They both worked perfectly fine for about a year now. This is the first problem I've had.

 

[BadBigBen]

The drive went 'south' on you...

check your power cable and SATA cable for correct seating...

Ben
"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."
How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.
Only ask questions with yes/no answers if you want "yes" or "no"

 

[thomasquinn]

I have done that a few times but I'll give it another go. Any other ideas?

 

[goombawaho]

Disconnect all the other drives except the one giving you problems. Download and burn the Ultimate Boot CD to a CD and then boot with it. Use the Western Digital drive analysis tool on that CD to see if it can see the drive and give you any info on it.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html

It's under hard disk tools and then hard disk diagnostic tools and use DLG Diagnostic (Western Digital) version 4.15 or 5.04c Try the higher one first and then the other if the first doesn't work.

 

[thomasquinn]

I'll try that now and post once I find out what happens, thanks.

 

[thomasquinn]

It doesn't detect the drive.. This is probably not a good thing, yes?

 

[kjv1611]

-it doesn't detect the drive...
That could be due to driver issues, being this is a SATA drive. Not likely, but possible.

More than likely, it's dead, Jim.

That's the joy of hard drives at times. ;p

If you have another desktop pc handy that has onboard SATA, you could try to see if it reacts differently there... or if you've got multiple SATA ports on the same pc motherboard, you could try another port or two.... especially if there is more than one sata controller - usually will be shown by having different colored sata ports - say, some red, some black..

If it is dead indeed, you can't get your data off, etc, you could always use it as a little science lab project of opening the sucker up, and seeing what it looks like on the inside. Then, like some folks have done, you could try to make some neat little gizmo out of the parts.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[thomasquinn]

It's not drivers because the other SATA drive works. I don't have another PC with onboard SATA but I have switched prots around. The other drive works in every port and this one doesn't work in any of them. I'm fearing it's just too far gone to bring back. I can feel it spinning though - it's like it still has a pulse haha.

 

[kjv1611]

Well, you can always just be creative with ways to "put it out of its misery" if you run out of ways to try and get it to work. You could always try a SATA to USB adapter to try to grab data off, but as others have noted in other threads - the most likely way you're going to access a damaged drive is via a direct connection to the mainboard, rather than a USB adapter.

And I mentioned earlier about creative things to do with your hard drive. Here are some ideas. ;0)

http://blog.macsales.com/807-creative-recycling-of-dead-hard-drives

http://chris.pirillo.com/what-can-you-do-with-a-dead-hard-drive/

Of course, the point of coming up with some other use for a dead hard drive means it's that much less likely anyone would ever grab any sensitive personal information off of the drives by any means.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[goombawaho]

If the data is valuable enough, spend the $500 plus to get the data off via professional recovery before you try anything crazy. If not, do something crazy like putting it in the freezer or one of those "tricks" to get a bad drive going.

You have a very good chance of getting your data off IF the drive is not clicking. Like, if it's not spinning up, it could just be the electronic brain of the drive or the motor which could be replaced and the platters with the data would be just fine.

If it's making weird noises, it could be grinding away at your data on the platters.

My freezer experiment yielded nothing except cold hands.

 

[thomasquinn]

I've never heard of the freezer idea but I'll try anything. No clicking, I've had a drive die like that before. I backed it up before it went. I wish I had that chance this time haha.

 

[goombawaho]

Look here for the freezer trick.

http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

If you don't hear the drive spinning up at all by putting your ear to it, I doubt this trick could even possibly help you.

It's more for when something is stuck inside the drive and freezing ALLEGEDLY will sometimes free it up by shrinking the metal. It's not an endorsed recovery technique, but more of a "what the heck" last try.