Is my hard drive dead or not? Please read on.?

Question

I have a hard drive that I have been trying to revive for weeks. At first, I just simply wanted to reformat my drive because my PC was running so slow. That didn't work and got into a position that I now had no OS on the system. I then tried whatever I could to wipe the drive and start from scratch. Now I get blue screened when trying to reinstall XP (either from Recovery CDs or another PC's CD). I have some utilities CDs that work (Ultimate Boot CD, Disk Utilities, etc.) but when I try to do a test on the hard drive I always get a message stating there were no HDDs found. But when I use PC Doctor and run all tests (including the Short and Long hard drive test) they all pass. The hard drive is not making any loud or clicking noises and the rest of the components either (I have the lid off).
Is there any chance I messed up some settings when using a wipe utility? In short, How do I find out for sure the drive is shot on my own or w/o hooking up to another PC? Please, only useful info.

Answer 1

Sorry to see that there are others like me who 'Can Make 'em Drink'. I've spent untold hours trying to resurrect dead or dying drives. Recently, I deceided life's too short, and have taken a hammer to several drives over the last few months.

When you can buy a brand new 500 GB SATA/300 Seagate for less than $100.

Sorry for the Sermon.



Drive Cable - Try an 80 conduct IDE cable, the 40 conductor cables can cause problems in BIOS.

If the HDD & CDROM are on the same IDE cable, split them up (i.e. Two seperate IDE cables).



If infact, you have taken the lid off the drive exposing the platters, etc. to dust and humidity the drive is doomed even if you get it running again. These drives are assembled in a Clean Room environment for a reason.



Good Luck

Answer 2

I found it interesting that another answerer suggested cable problems. If you where able to successfully complete read and write tests, the cable is fine, and so is the drive most likely.



It's to bad you had to find out the hard way the reformatting and reinstalling should be the last resort, not the fixall like to many of these wannabees on this site are always saying.



OK, off my soap box and on to fixing your box!

This is going to take some research and a little time but it's a good learning experience.

The reason you're getting the crashes trying to reinstall is there are proprietary drivers for the motherboard or some of it's hardware missing. They where on the drive, but we know what happened to them. So, if you're lucky enough to have the disks or CD's that came with the box, this will be easy. If not, you will have to get the model number of the motherboard, go to their website and download them. If the box is a Dell or Gateway or the like, you can get them off their website for the drivers.

Now, we have drivers, what's next? Here is where it get's a bit iffy. Since you are able to boot, the issue is how to get the drivers installed when the Utils don't see it. The installation of the drivers needs to happen before we can format, so the next step is to build an autoexec.bat and config.sys to handle the driver install and the format for us.

Go the bootdisk.com and download a windows98 boot disk, either to a floppy if you have one or make a bootable CD with it. Use the instructions with the drivers on how to install them. Most likely it will be a simple command line entry like" a:\>mydriver.exe /C:"

In this case, I used "a" as the drive you booted from.

Here's the bad news. If you only have recovery CD's for your OS, your screwed, you get to buy your very own copy.

Now, the drivers are loaded, insert a FULL INSTALLATION version of XP or 2K and it first will check the drive and if it isn't functioning properly will tell you it can't continue, but I'm betting you will get the option to format the drive. You should be home free from here.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

Good luck!

Answer 3

When you wiped the drive you wiped out the format, you need to use a boot dos disk and format the drive before the computer will even know there is a hard drive installed. Right now your hard drive is in the raw state.



If you broke the seal on the hard drive, it is toast. No good.

Answer 4

probable no longer. do no longer set it to grasp. this is an IDE/PATA subject, no longer SATA. there is in basic terms one rigidity consistent with cable in SATA, so grasp/slave settings are pointless. seems such as you will have an argument including your computing gadget recognizing the rigidity. Boot up into BIOS. Is the rigidity detected? If no longer, that must be the topic. Your motherboard motive force disc is probable no longer required, to no longer detect the no longer undemanding rigidity. you need to attempt urgent F6 while triggered mutually as the abode windows CD is booting, and insert the motherboard disc mutually as booting to load any third occasion drivers. whether this is mandatory, the abode windows boot technique will detect the mandatory drivers and you're reliable to flow. If it rather is not any longer mandatory, then the abode windows boot technique will checklist it may no longer discover functional drivers and you will ought to seem at a various answer. At THIS factor, if all the above has failed, then you definitely can declare the no longer undemanding rigidity lifeless.... nonetheless you need to attempt plugging it in to a various computing gadget just to envision for specific.

Answer 5

maybe you can try to change the IDE cable that connecting to your hard drive from the motherboard. It might have gotten damaged or loosened over the time you had the computer. If you do get a new IDE cable, it's not that expensive.