Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
software works on deleted files as well as formatted drives. I believe this would be the easiest
solution.
From: Bob Matott
One additional thought for the rare problem—swap the circuit board from a known working
identical drive onto the bad one. Sometimes the electronics do take a "hit.”
From: Craig Connelly
1. Check the old CMOS on board battery. Replace if necessary.
2. Get the drive specs and go to the manufacturer's site and get the info on the drive.
3. Try to use a boot disk from a well-known Utility software package.
4. Use a Data Recovery program if the drive will spin up. Get the data off the drive.
5. Fdisk/MBR the drive and see if it will then accept a new OS install.
6. Don't waste too much time on the issue. Data is only as good as your last backup.
Figure out how the cost benefit of trying to bring the drive back to life and just getting a new
drive.
"Save early, Save often.”
From: Pahl Jeff TSgt AFMIA/MISO
For FAT file systems.
1st boot from floppy and try to access C:.
If that doesn't work, run Fdisk /MBR. Sometimes replacing the master boot record will fix a
non-booting drive.
From:Matthew Harvey
Had this happen last year. Tried running the drive as a slave in another machine (could be the
controller, you know) but that didn't do the trick. So we sent it away to a recovery shop. They
charge $100 to look at it, send you a list of all the files they could find and recover, and then
they want $1,500 to send you those files on a CD-R. We balked at the charge and said, "No
thanks, just send us back our hard drive." They did. Of course, in order to read the disk and
list the files for us, they had to make a repair to the drive. When it was returned to us I was
able to slave it in another machine and copy all of its contents—just finished before their jury-
rigged repair failed on us. Full data recovery for $100—not a bad deal, huh?
From: Spike
There are many different ways to approach this. It should depend on the O/S involved.
• In a Win95 situation, the first thing is to check the BIOS configuration and make sure that
the user didn't inadvertently turn off the HDD.
• If this checks out okay, open the PC and check to make sure the cable is secure...or replace
it to rule this out.
• If still no go, boot from a floppy (DOS or Win95 Startup Disk will do) and sys the drive using
the sys c:\ command.
• Often this will work with Win95.
• If the drive boots (even just to a prompt) run a virus scan. Many viruses hide themselves in
the boot record and will actually copy the boot record to a different part of the drive...thus, not
