Hard Drive Won't Boot.

[Newb1029]

I was asked if I could help an individual out at work with a HD issue. His HD will not boot. It is a 40 GB IBM Desk Star. The OS, I believe is Win 2000. The computer will start and essentially hang up. I have tried to boot from safe mode and from the last known good config. I have also removed the HD and tried it on another box as a primary and a slave. No luck either way. I am sold on the fact that there is a major issue with the drive, I assume. My concern is data recovery. Is there anyway to mount the drive somewhere else or a tool that will allow this drive to be seen so data can be recovered. I hope I have been clear enough. Thanks for the help.

[paul9]

try booting from a linux live cd such as suse, knoppix or morphix

[Newb1029]

I have just (today) started to try this. I have Red Hat and it will not recognize the drive. Now this was a box with Red Hat as the only OS. I set the hurt HD up as a slave with no luck. The only thing (mnt) would see is cdrom1, cdrom, and floppy. So I unpluged on of the CD roms and put the hurt HD on that with no luck. I do have a bootable copy of whiteglove, think this will work?

[jmebonner]

Not sure if that'll work or not, but, not trying to be funny, therer is a reason so many people refer to those hdds as the 'death star'. If you end up replacing it, get a maxtor or WD.

Just me own two cents worth!

[paul9]

i don't know whiteglove, but the ' live ' distros can run entirely from cd and memory, so it has less chance of writing something to a screwy hd and in the process making it worse. try it with one cdrom and your hd set to master and on different ide cables. also try the manufactures website for recovery/repair utilities. btw when you put the drives into the machine, go to the bios options and autodetect the hd AND cdrom, and if you've already been booting redhat, then you must have already set your cdrom as the first boot device.

[Newb1029]

Thanks! I agree "Death Stars" are not great...but cheap companies and all...you deal with what you get till it breaks I guess. I will try with Linux a little more to see what comes of it...the manufactures website was an overlook on my part good idea...if they know thier drives are prone to going south maybe they will have some tool or something. Thanks...I'll let you guys know how it goes.