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Sata hdd suddenly not recognised

991 Views 9 Replies 5 Participants Last post by  unibiggle
I woke up this morning and my pc wouldn't boot up:upset:. I checked the bios and my hdd is not even showing up. i have a 500gb hard drive and an asus p5n-e sli motherboard, the hdd is a maxtor diamond max 21. i read a few other threads but couldn't get a definitive solution. Many thanks
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check the cables to the drive and the motherboard have not come loose
i've checked them about 10 times to no effect. it makes a faint noise and vibrates when it starts up but then nothing.
I just need to get some info off it and i'll get a new one but i just need to get into it somehow
After the drive makes a faint noise then vibrates can you hear it spinning after that?

Have you tried replacing the data cables?
put the new one in and see what you can salvage from the old one
I've replaced the power cable and the data cable - still nothing.
It spins when it ts up.
How would i go about recovering the ld drive from a new one?

Thanks
slave it to a new one and drag what you want over to it
Yeah, the old drivee is unbootable. You need to get a new one and see if it is salvageable. Once the new drive has the operating system re installed and the drivers are installed, then you can try a data retrieval. To do this you need to first power down your computer, take the side off the case and hook the old drive up and boot into windows ( or you could use an external hard drive kit). Next go into My Computer and check and see if your old drive comes up. If it does, start copying data off the drive. Not all data may come off, it will depend on if any data is corrupt or not. If the drive does not show up, then it is unreadable.
The most common answer to such a SATA problem is definitely the data cable. They don't fasten securely to the drive and can work loose.
After having that problem with mine, more times than I want to admit to, I finally HOT Glued the connector to the drive. That put an end to that problem, once and for all.
Now, I HOT Glue every data cable to every SATA drive I install.

You also need to check the power cable. Check every connection all the way back to the power supply.


They also DO fail. I've RMA'd several SATA drives in the past year. Most were WD but one was a Maxtor.
I suspect they all fell subject to heat exhaustion.

Good Luck,
The Shadow :cool:
Thanks for all your help guys. I have a new hard drive coming tomorrow and i'll see if i can recover any data from the old one.

theshadow - I have tried a new power cable from a source i know to be working, however i haven't checked the old one back to the power supply unit. I will also give this a try

Thanks again, will report back in a few days with what has happened
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