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Recover from HDD that Win 2K won't recognise

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50020xecLA

Technical User
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Mar 16, 2005
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Hi first of all I have searched for a suitable thread to post/read but haven't found one, so I have created this one.

to cut a long story short, my hard drive has kind of died. I had it partitioned into two drives, C: and D: The C dirve which held the operating system (win XP) is no more. I run up FDISK with a floppy boot disk, and it said that the C drive was unformatted. so I formatted the c dirve and tried to install win XP once again. this didn't work, and I think that the boot sector on the HDD may be bust? The platter spins, as I can feel it.

I bought a replacement drive, and installed this fine, installed Win 2K on NTFS, but all of the data that I want is on the damaged HDD D: drive.

I connect the damaged drive to the ide ribbon, and both drives have been correctly jumpered to work as Master (good HDD) and slave (bad HDD).

When I boot up, the OS fails to see the second drive. If I enter the BIOS, the HDD is there. However, when I do boot up, there is an instruction right at the beginning (when the RAM is counted and the HDD and CDs are identified) that is executed (I forget just what) that passes on the good HDD, but fails on the bad HDD.

The first problem is that I can't get the computer to recognise the HDD. ANy suggestions? Basically, I guess you can say it won't mount.

There must be tools that exist to get the data off? after all, if I go into the BIOS, it does recognise that there is a drive there, it just doesn't mount?

Any ideas? any help most welcome.

reagrds

SJP
 
SJP,

Your options are limited. You might be able to replace the PCB to get the drive "recognized". I've found an exact replacement works the best. You can find more information on the hard drive PCB replacement at
The other option would be to check with companies that provide on-line recovery service. More information can be found at Some of these can correct the symptoms you've described.


Rick
 
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