Recovering a crashed Hard Drive

[Chacal]

Dude, if your bios doesnt see it its toast. The only advice an old tech like me can give you is to stick it in the freezer for a few hours then immediately plug it back in and see if you can pull the data to another drive or cdr/dvdr. It sounds kooky, but it works at least a small percentage of the time.

Without having to put it in the freezer, even letting it cool down a bit has worked for me a few times. I only had
to recover the MBR, which some free tools do quite well (MBRWORKS for instance).
Having a second HD to transfer to is useful if you can't launch your system properly.
By running a system disk and only read access your drive you'll have less chances of crashing it.
Good Luck

Chacal

 

[Breakdaddy]

Without having to put it in the freezer, even letting it cool down a bit has worked for me a few times. I only had
to recover the MBR, which some free tools do quite well (MBRWORKS for instance).
Having a second HD to transfer to is useful if you can't launch your system properly.
By running a system disk and only read access your drive you'll have less chances of crashing it.
Good Luck

Chacal

If you ever need to recover the MBR at this point, XP and 2k have built-in resources for this on the installation media. Run a repair from the self booting media in console mode and then use the command FIXMBR and also FIXBOOT if the FIXMBR doesnt do the trick by itself. For future reference, this is quick and included. Still, this trick wont work on the original poster's issue, as the bios will no longer see the HDD.

 

[Chacal]

If you ever need to recover the MBR at this point, XP and 2k have built-in resources for this on the installation media.

I'm still using W98 on my old machine, but it's nice to know that they thought about this.

Still, this trick wont work on the original poster's issue, as the bios will no longer see the HDD.

I had bios refusing to see HDs that saw them again a few hours later when everything was cooler. So there might be some hope.


Chacal

 

[Abraxas]

Hmmm . . . I don't see a link below.

You could email me at quasitmoto at hotmail dot com