Re: WD 40GB hard drive unreadable? Help needed!
- From: Barry Watzman <WatzmanNOSPAM@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2007 02:18:55 -0400
Try the freezer trick, but don't try to reboot using that drive. Instead, try the drive as a 2nd drive in another PC. All you want to do here is recover files, and rebooting results in writes to the hard drive, which reduces your chances of data recovery.
RnR wrote:
Before I say toast, put the hard drive in the freezer over night and.
then try it in the pc again. If it works, immediately take the files
off of it that you need as I don't know if it will reboot normally
again.
On Tue, 7 Aug 2007 21:17:52 -0700, "Kevin" <webman6@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
I'm looking at a Western Digital 40GB hard drive out of a Dell Dimension 4400. The system went belly up on a friend with the cryptic error message of "Boot Failure: System Halted" on a black screen. Hitting F8 on a restart did not get me to the expected screen, the boot options of Safe Mode, Last Known Good Configuration and so on. When I was able to hit F2 or F12 on a restart I was able to see the BIOS setup screen. The lights on the back of the tower are all green. There is a single beep on startup.
The hard drive did not show, in the BIOS setup, as a device for booting the system. Only the CD-ROM drive and "Removable Device" appeared. I have never seen that before. With the BIOS version of A03, which I am just guessing was the original BIOS for this system from 2002, it appears inputs are minimal.
I attempted a repair of Windows after setting the CD drive to boot and the Windows installation applet told me that no hard disk could be found. An attempt to fully reinstall Windows got the same result: No Hard Disk Found.
I took the drive out, stuck it in an external usb drive box and plugged it into my laptop at home. It was seen as a USB Mass Storage Device. But it did not show up in Disk Management. And, of course, it isn't seen in My Computer or Windows Explorer. Device Manager showed it, and checking the properties, it shows it as Unreadable with no volume size. When I would remove the drive (Safely Remove Hardware) and unplug it and then plug it back in, the drive would make a single "click" when it received power. It spins up and the outside of the drive housing gets warm, so it is apparently spinning away inside there.
I moved the jumpers from Cable Select (Dell Default) to Master to Slave. No change.
So, what do you guys think? Is this drive toast or is there some other way to see the drive and get data off of it?
- References:
- WD 40GB hard drive unreadable? Help needed!
- From: Kevin
- Re: WD 40GB hard drive unreadable? Help needed!
- From: RnR
- WD 40GB hard drive unreadable? Help needed!
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