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Need help! Can't detect a hard drive!
So my computer crashed today, while my wife was booting it up this morning. It went into CHKDSK mode on bootup, and when it finally got to WinXP she couldn't run any of the applications. She tried to do a reboot, it froze, and I manually powered it down. On restart, the WinXP splash screen loaded, but then the blue screen of death came up with the message 'unmountable_boot_volume'.
Not wanting to lose data by trying a format and reinstall, I purchased a new hard drive and installed WinXP on that. My plan was to use the new hard drive as my primary drive, and the 'bad' hard drive as a secondary, and hopefully recover my data. Coincindentally, without knowing it, I picked up the same hard drive as what was already in the machine - which is a Dimension 8400, and the hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE 160gb model.
After installing WinXP and all the updates, I then reconnected the 'bad' drive, in hopes of being able to recover the data. After booting up with it connected, I can't seem to get that hard drive to show up. Not in the Device Manager at all, nor is it visible in the 'manage' tools either.
With the new hard drive came Western Digital's CD utility, called Lifeguard Tools. I disconnected the 'good' drive, and put the 'bad' drive in the primary SATA slot on the mother board to see if the utility would pick it up. Booting from WD's CD, I ran the utility. I ran a simple diagnostic test on the bad drive, and it actually was able to pick up the drive and read the number of heads, sectors, etc. So, physically, the hard drive could be ok.
So I'm trying to figure out how I can connect to this 'bad' hard drive again. Any suggestions are appreciated. I've checked all the cables, all the drivers are up to date... I'm out of ideas.
Not wanting to lose data by trying a format and reinstall, I purchased a new hard drive and installed WinXP on that. My plan was to use the new hard drive as my primary drive, and the 'bad' hard drive as a secondary, and hopefully recover my data. Coincindentally, without knowing it, I picked up the same hard drive as what was already in the machine - which is a Dimension 8400, and the hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE 160gb model.
After installing WinXP and all the updates, I then reconnected the 'bad' drive, in hopes of being able to recover the data. After booting up with it connected, I can't seem to get that hard drive to show up. Not in the Device Manager at all, nor is it visible in the 'manage' tools either.
With the new hard drive came Western Digital's CD utility, called Lifeguard Tools. I disconnected the 'good' drive, and put the 'bad' drive in the primary SATA slot on the mother board to see if the utility would pick it up. Booting from WD's CD, I ran the utility. I ran a simple diagnostic test on the bad drive, and it actually was able to pick up the drive and read the number of heads, sectors, etc. So, physically, the hard drive could be ok.
So I'm trying to figure out how I can connect to this 'bad' hard drive again. Any suggestions are appreciated. I've checked all the cables, all the drivers are up to date... I'm out of ideas.
- Yes, it was indeed the bios not having the 2nd sata port turned on. Now I have successfully booted up with the bad drive being recognized by windows - sort of.
Everything is extremely slow, loading up and using explorer to view the folders. I can't view anything on the bad drive, it gives an error of:
D:/ is not accessible.
Error performing inpage operation.
Under Computer Management/Storage/Disk management I have the following screenshot, located at:
home (dot) nycap (dot) rr (dot) com/scottaw/screenshot.JPG (Dell's website apparently doesn't allow linking)
I don't like that it says 100% is free, but... I'm kind of stuck now, not sure what to try next.
Freezing a hard drive helps? How? Can't say I've heard of that one before!
rickmktg
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Posted April 9th, 2006 13:00