[CeeJay01]

Hi to all.

Newbie here.
My machine has (had) 2 hard drives. Primary master (40G) & slave (80G) and a DVD writer set up as secondary master. Running XP Home SP2.

I have a problem with a hard drive that was running as the primary slave.
It all started one night when shutting down. It just didn't, it sat there for about ten minutes doing nothing. (It wasn't installing updates by the way).
I had to hit the reset button and then it booted up & shut down normally.
Next morning upon start up I got the message: "HD failure, no operating system detected insert boot disk", or something similar.
The only way I can get the machine to boot now is to disconnect the primary slave then everything works fine. So thus confirming the 40G drive with the operating system is OK.
Everytime I connect this drive to either primary or secondary IDE's I get the same HD failure message. I am beginning to suspect the power side of the drive now.
Anyone have any ideas how to recover the data from this drive as it was only about 80% backed up
The drive was a genuine IBM 80G. Never had this happen to a hard drive before
Any help would be truly appreciated.

Chris.

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You can search IBM's website, support area for a bootable hardrive utility that may be able to run some tests on that drive. It may or may not work but it's worth a try.

http://www.ibm.com/support/us/

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

"IBM - Hitachi Drive Fitness Test will create a self-booting DOS diskette to run the DFT utility. The Drive Fitness Test (DFT) provides a quick, reliable method to test SCSI and IDE hard disk drives."

Make sure you avoid using anything that writes to the drive.

http://www.softpedia...ness-Test.shtml

My other idea would be to put the drive in an external hard drive box that connects through usb. You may be able to access the drive that way. Then again the drive could be totally gone. All you can do is try.....

edit....I don't know if this will work or not but I would connect the slave drive back up and boot with that utility disk mentioned above.....

Edited by macten, 24 October 2006 - 11:34 PM.

[macten]

You can search IBM's website, support area for a bootable hardrive utility that may be able to run some tests on that drive. It may or may not work but it's worth a try.

http://www.ibm.com/support/us/

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

"IBM - Hitachi Drive Fitness Test will create a self-booting DOS diskette to run the DFT utility. The Drive Fitness Test (DFT) provides a quick, reliable method to test SCSI and IDE hard disk drives."

Make sure you avoid using anything that writes to the drive.

http://www.softpedia...ness-Test.shtml

My other idea would be to put the drive in an external hard drive box that connects through usb. You may be able to access the drive that way. Then again the drive could be totally gone. All you can do is try.....

edit....I don't know if this will work or not but I would connect the slave drive back up and boot with that utility disk mentioned above.....

Edited by macten, 24 October 2006 - 11:34 PM.

[CeeJay01]

Hi macten.

Thanks for trying to assist.
I've found the Hitachi Drive fitness test software.
I will be giving this a try.
Many thanks.
I will keep you posted.

Chris.