Hard drive disappeared!

[Chiguy]

A friend gave me a hard drive to pull files from since her computer fried. Ok, so I put it in my computer and Windows (XP) sees it fine for a couple days. When I turn the computer on now, it takes an long time to boot and when it finally does, the drive is gone. It is listed in device manager and it shows up in the BIOS but I can't access it. I'm thinking the drive might be going bad and or somehow the partition disappeared.


What can I do here?

Go to the mfr's website and d/l their utility to check the drive.

Here are some links to get you where you want to go.

[Chiguy]

Thanks. It was a Maxtor hard drive so I downloaded the Maxtor one but it said on their site that their current version doesn't work with UATA on Nvidia chipsets (which I have). I tried it anyways but all it did was start the program and then kick me out to prompt when I pressed the indicated key to start things.

I tried using an demo version of Ontrack's Data Advisor but it locks up before all of the tests could be peformed. Is this a possible sign of failing hard drive???

Do you have another mobo to put the HDD on so you can run the Maxtor software? You don't need to boot the drive, just the floppy.

[Chiguy]

No I don't.

[Chiguy]

I'm trying out this program called GetDataBack (for pulling data from lost partitions) but it's not looking too good right now. It just keeps finding error after error.

[Chiguy]

bumpage

[Xaotic]

You might want to try this recovery tool as well.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

I've had good results with it. Unfortunately, once a drive is too far gone, nothing really seems to help.

[Bill in SD, CA]

Beginners Guides: Hard Drive Data Recovery

Good luck!

Bill

[Chiguy]

Thanks