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hard drive not being recognised


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#1
tryinghard

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Hi,

Needing a bit of advice and I am not hugely computer literate. Well, better than my parents - but that's about it. I promise this isn't about viruses - it's about a hard drive.

Ok, so my computer got a virus. By running McAffee it seemed to cause an error in XP and, although the computer would start, only the wall-paper would load up. There was no desktop icon, no toolbar, nothing at all. I could access task manager and worked out that all my files were still there, but it wouldn't run programs and it wouldn't let me export the files to my usb key or burn a cd with them on it. Was able to get a few out on a floppy-disk, but didn't have enough to export everything I needed.

Then my boyfriend took over and decided to connect my hard drive as a slave drive to his spare computer. But he messed it up and connected them both as primary drives. Since then, the virus drive has not been recognised by the computer, although the other one has been.

I put the hard drive in to a shop and have had all the files exported - so I have my data. But they aren't able to reformat the drive, saying that their computer isn't even recognising the drive anymore.

So, is there anything I can do? I know it seems stupid asking this after I've put it in a shop, but really - their knowledge is worse than mine. It took them a week to transfer files to a dvd!

so my question is - how do you reformat a drive that's not being recognised?

if you've read this far - you're a star
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#2
GoCompute

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In Windows 98, just go to Display, Effects, and under that tab uncheck Hide Icons when desktop is viewed as a web page. It should fix your problem.
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#3
tryinghard

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hmm...but the hard drive isn't working.

Or wasn't working - as I thought, the shop was incompetent and we managed to get the hard drive reformatted.

Appologies for talking up space :tazz:
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#4
Samm

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Welcome to G2G

Basically, if the drive isn't detected by the system (I assume you mean the bios, not windows) then you can't format it.

It may be worth just double checking a couple of things though :

1. Remove the drive from the system & check the jumpers on the rear of the drive (you should see one or more small plastic caps placed over 2 rows of pins). On the label on top of the drive, there should be the jumper config diagram. Make sure that the jumper is set to make the drive a master. If you have trouble doing this, let me know the make & model of the drive & I'll will guide you through it.

2. Next, return the drive to the computer & check the orientation of the ribbon cable. The cable should have a red stripe down one edge. When connecting the cable to the drive, this striped edge must be nearest to the drives power connector.

3. Check the cable is inserted in the motherboard correctly - if you look closely at the connector on the motherboard, you should see a '1' printed on the board at one end of the connector. The striped edge of the cable must be at the end marked '1'.

4. Also make sure the cable is the right way round - if one of the plugs on the cable is blue, then this must be the one connected to the motherboard. The drive then connects to the last plug on the opposite end of the cable. If your cable doesn't have a blue plug, let me know what colours each plug is.

5. Once all that is done, switch the system on & go into the bios. Let the bios auto detect the drives & see if it finds it
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#5
tryinghard

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thank you very much.

We fixed it - we'd plugged it into the shorter lead. And then we ran the XP cd and it said that the drive was wrongly parsed (i think) but it recognised it and reformatted it.

thanks again
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