Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
• If neither of these work (and you're usually lucky if they do), then it's time to boot to a virus
scan floppy and scan the boot sector for viruses.
• If there are none, then I'd move to a third-party utility, like NDD, and give that a whirl. If all
of those fail, then I send it out to a data recovery center and drop 1,200 bucks of my
company's money to recover data that the developer should have backed up in the first place.
From: Jeffery Aronson
After the routine checks of CMOS and drive settings etc., the most important step would be to
clone the drive first as it is. I would recommend a program such as ghost, but there are others
available. After completing the drive clone, work with the drive that you cloned and not the
original drive. You can use a program called On The Wire or Drive Wizard. These programs will
attempt to rebuild the various different aspects of the drive, FAT tables, Directory Structures,
Files Structure etc. In most cases, you can at least get enough of the drive back to get to that
important data, and never risk the original drive.
From:Tim Danner
• Make sure you put the drive type back to Auto in the CMOS. Then listen to hear if the drive is
even spinning up. If the drive isn't spinning up, you can try the old tap technique to try and
wake up the drive. If you are able to wake the drive, have the user backup important files
immediately. Then replace.
• If the dive is spinning but it still isn't seen by the POST, then you need to try and locate a
drive of the same make and model. Swapping the controllers on the two drives may allow you
to access the data.
• If neither of these techniques help, then I usually tell the user to have a good cry, and then
start over. But this time make sure you backup important files on a regular basis.
From: Steve Summers
I would suspect a bad disk controller first. Before I replaced it, though, if I was lucky enough to
get the drive to come up, I would immediately run scan disk and scan the surface area. If
everything checked out, I would replace the drive controller and see if the problem went away
on the same problematic drive.
From: Salman Siddiqui
There would be a couple of points to check before going into recovery mode:
1. Is LBA mode on or off? Toggling it and setting drive type to auto may help.
2. Was a Disk Manager type program in use? If it was, refreshing the MBR with the Disk
Manager may do the trick. If first has been tried and answer to the second question is no, I
would use a low level disk editor to discover the bounds of the partitions, first and last
cylinder. Remaining data, number of heads, and sectors per track can be worked out easily.
From: Thomas Bounds
Of the many different solutions that could solve this problem, I will start with the easiest.
