larrywilcox
New Member
Hello all. Before I get started I want to thank those who take the time to read my post and offer words of wisdom in regards to my problem.
I have a hard drive that appears to have failed. It's a WDC 400BB (Western Digitial Caviar 40 gig) manufacture date - April 2001. It belongs to a friend of mine and it was part of a system I built a few years ago. It was running Win ME without any problems until recently where the computer froze and upon reboot the system gave a message "Drive error, system halted." The hard drive also made clicking noises indicative of head failure. The drive was running as a single drive on the primary IDE controller. One thing that I had noticed is that the BIOS was no longer detecting the hard drive. My guess is the hard drive has seen better days but my friend has data on it that he would like to recover if possible. We're hoping there may be a way to get to whats on the drive without going the data recovery route (which is quite expensive).
One suggestion that was made by an IT guy I used to work with was the boot sector on the drive may have failed and setting up the drive to run as a slave under another drive as a master may allow access to the drive. Apparently he has had a similar problem with a WD drive and his solution worked for him. We tried this route with a new HD set as a master and the "problem" drive set as a slave. I ruled out a faulty cable as the new drive was picked up without a problem (I also swapped the cable with a new one just to be sure). The problem drive however still was not being detected by the bios. In the bios I decided to change the setting for detection of the primary slave to "IDE removable" as opposed to "auto" to see if that would make a difference in detecting the problem hard drive. Oddly enough the BIOS then recognized the problem drive, listing its model number, etc. and identifying it was connected through an 80 pin cable. Unfortunately we still could not access the drive. FDISK doesn't acknowledge the drive is there even though the BIOS seems to recognize it now. The diagnostics tool from WD didn't pick up the drive either. The clicking noise also disappeared once this problem drive was setup for use as a slave drive.
After doing some searching on this forum and other places on the net I am still at a loss as to whether or not there is any hope of getting into this hard drive. I know the possibility of a dead drive is there but we're hoping that's not the case. One thing I may try after a bit is putting the problem drive into a couple of different boxes in a slave role to see if it can be detected/accessed.
Has anyone here had a similar problem with a drive and has had luck getting back into it? Any insight would be appreciated
Edit: I tried setting up the "problem" drive as a slave in another box of mine with no luck. The bios of this box actually reported it as "hard drive failed" while checking my drives during boot up. The bios wouldn't acknowledge the drive at all, even with manual settings (as 'auto' didn't work either). It's looking grim.
I have a hard drive that appears to have failed. It's a WDC 400BB (Western Digitial Caviar 40 gig) manufacture date - April 2001. It belongs to a friend of mine and it was part of a system I built a few years ago. It was running Win ME without any problems until recently where the computer froze and upon reboot the system gave a message "Drive error, system halted." The hard drive also made clicking noises indicative of head failure. The drive was running as a single drive on the primary IDE controller. One thing that I had noticed is that the BIOS was no longer detecting the hard drive. My guess is the hard drive has seen better days but my friend has data on it that he would like to recover if possible. We're hoping there may be a way to get to whats on the drive without going the data recovery route (which is quite expensive).
One suggestion that was made by an IT guy I used to work with was the boot sector on the drive may have failed and setting up the drive to run as a slave under another drive as a master may allow access to the drive. Apparently he has had a similar problem with a WD drive and his solution worked for him. We tried this route with a new HD set as a master and the "problem" drive set as a slave. I ruled out a faulty cable as the new drive was picked up without a problem (I also swapped the cable with a new one just to be sure). The problem drive however still was not being detected by the bios. In the bios I decided to change the setting for detection of the primary slave to "IDE removable" as opposed to "auto" to see if that would make a difference in detecting the problem hard drive. Oddly enough the BIOS then recognized the problem drive, listing its model number, etc. and identifying it was connected through an 80 pin cable. Unfortunately we still could not access the drive. FDISK doesn't acknowledge the drive is there even though the BIOS seems to recognize it now. The diagnostics tool from WD didn't pick up the drive either. The clicking noise also disappeared once this problem drive was setup for use as a slave drive.
After doing some searching on this forum and other places on the net I am still at a loss as to whether or not there is any hope of getting into this hard drive. I know the possibility of a dead drive is there but we're hoping that's not the case. One thing I may try after a bit is putting the problem drive into a couple of different boxes in a slave role to see if it can be detected/accessed.
Has anyone here had a similar problem with a drive and has had luck getting back into it? Any insight would be appreciated
Edit: I tried setting up the "problem" drive as a slave in another box of mine with no luck. The bios of this box actually reported it as "hard drive failed" while checking my drives during boot up. The bios wouldn't acknowledge the drive at all, even with manual settings (as 'auto' didn't work either). It's looking grim.
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