Hard Drive Disappearance

D

DCM

New Member
Computer
Windows XP Professional SP2
Motherboard make and model.
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
896MB SDRAM
GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP
Creative SB Audigy
Western Digital 80GB
Western Digital 200GB
Nikao 450W Power Supply

General:
I'm usually good at these, especially if i've had whatever problem before however this one is new and have yet to figure a fix.

Problem:
My father told me his 200GB HDD has disappeared off his system. I checked, it shows up in his BIOS as well as his Device Manager. He told me he did nothing out of the ordinary that would cause the HDD to disappear. I checked the cabling, it's snug (like I said, it POSTs and shows in the DM.).

AVG scan came clear so it doesn't seem like a virus doing it. Does anyone have any suggestions? Something?

Thanks!
 
It's an IDE.

It was working fine several hours ago, doesn't need to/want to be formatted as it was functional no more than 5 hours ago. All I remember was him moving the computer for 10/20 minutes and then putting it back, which I checked the cabling and it looks secure still :?
 
Update:

I took his HDD out and slapped it on my secondary and booted. I got some Primary Slave HDD Error message and pressed F1 to continue. It did not show up in My Computer, same as his.

I also swapped IDE cables before hand to no success. Any ideas? :[
 
It sounds to me like a hardware problem with the drive. Windows/bios can communicate with the drive electronics but nothing is accessible on the disk. You looked in Device Manager, what did it say about the data transfer for the IDE channel the drive is on? That's in IDE Controllers / Advanced Settings. If the hdd has reverted to PIO from previous UDMA(?) it's probably a sign that there is no read/write capability.

Starman*
 
Another thing i've noticed is that i've gone into his DM and right clicked his HDD under the Disk Drives, went to Volume and hit populate. Shows up with nothing, any idea why?
 
DCM said:
I checked his settings and under the Secondary one in Advanced it states DMA if available.
Click to expand...
What is in the box under that - the data transfer mode. Sounds like it is blank since you did not mention it. Typically it would be UDMA 5 or 6. Blank or PIO is not good news.

Re populating volumes. If it does not show any partitions, it is not seeing the file system on the drive. Another place to look is in Programs / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Disk Management. I suspect your hdd will be blank, no NTFS file system no partitions (if there were any).

You should also try the Data Lifeguard diagnostics prog from the download section of the WD site.

Starman*
 
I was about to go format his C and see if it would fix it but I saw this:

<Setup cannot access this disk.>

I can see the 190GB (200GB) drive. I am guessing this is bad?
 
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