rmcd

Hi;

Could someone please confirm that my drive is pooched. Or suggest a means that I can recover the data.

The problem occured while upgrading my father-in-laws PC (so you know that I'm a dead man). I was running partitionmagic to resize a partition when it failed during the batch process (I believe it was truncating one of the partitions).

The next subsequent boot showed a problem with the disk finding system files (not surprising). Figuring the partition was toast, I took the drive out of the machine and put it into a removable drive bay carrier in another machine to see what could be recovered. Upon boot, that machine would not recognize any IDE drives. The BIOS stalled at "Identifying IDE drives".

I've tried the drive in a number of machines with no success **including the original machine **. It causes all of them to stall during BIOS start up. The original configuration used cable select. I also tried different IDE cables and with master/slave set appropriately.

The disk is an IBM Deskstar IC35L040AVVN07 - 40GB. Manufactured in Nov 02. Yeah, I know. It's pretty old.

Is she pooched? Am I a dead man?

Thanks

justpassingby

Hi rmcd !

Run DriveFitness and see if it finds the drive :
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT

Stu_computer

Hi rmcd, welcome to TSF.

That's not a good sign. If DriveFitness doesn't work I suggest you use an external usb drive enclosure, that way you can at least boot up without problems, plug in the USB after you get to the desktop, should get a 'found new hardware' message with the hdd model number.

It may work, though the odds are against it.

Tip: sometimes you can find older CD/DVD external drives (with a/c power adapter) at a cheaper price, just take the CD/DVD drive out and connect the hdd.

rmcd

Ah - Thank you Stu.

Booting is a definate problem. Doesn't get past the BIOS startup. Excellent idea to try it in an external drive housing. I think I might even have just the external CD/DVD drive to do the trick.

Stay tuned.

rmcd

Rats. Still didn't work. I think the drive's electronics are dead. Luckily not much data was lost so I'm not going to do much more about it. I delivered a rebuilt and configured system to the father-on-law tonight. He seems content.

Thanks for the tips. Good ones.

Cheers

Stu_computer

Sometimes you get lucky with that trick, but more often it fails.
Though retrying it on different jumper setting (MA or CS) does occassionally work.

I've got an old maxtor kicking around that just dies ever once in a while (was a factory recall), but if I leave it sit for a few weeks it will run again like there was never a problem.

That's the main goal, so you won that round.

rmcd

It's sitting on my desk at the moment reminding me to be more careful with partitionmagic. I'll leave it there for a few weeks and try it again.

Thanks again for all your help.