[cleosama]

Hopefully I'll get alot of help. I'm really new to this.

I built my computer myself and had had it for about 4 year, the about 4 months ago it started to act up. My computer died about a month ago. I can still start the computer, however all I can get into is my bios. It simply crashed and now the system says that I have no hard-drives at all. I've had those hard-drives for a good couple of years and there was nothing wrong with them before. I've even tried to fix the computer with the system disk, and it wont let me because The un-recognized hard-drives have the things I need to fix on them? who know.

heres the bad part. I'm broke, and my college career is on those hard-drives. I'm afraid that its 50,000 dollars worth of hard effort down the drain. I'm a 3d-modeler. So my demo reel (in which I was supposed to be able to get a job with.) my save files, all proof that I'm a good modeler will be lost in the wind if I don't get this fixxed.

I moved to Seattle to get a job in the gaming industry, and without a demo reel I'm screwed. I'm working crap jobs and barely getting by. That leaves me with no money to (if worse case senerio comes) to retrieve the files off of the hard-drives for something like 1,000 dollars, and enough money to re-build my computer.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Please don't suggest reformatting my hard-drives.

heres all that I know of my System Specs-
Windows XP
1gig DDR SDRAM
I have no clue about the rest.. I just ordered it off of newegg and installed it. The computer cost me about 2,000 dollars though.

please please help!!!
thanks bunches
-chrystal

Your e-mail address has been removed. Please do not include an e-mail address in any post

Edited by Keith, 17 September 2005 - 07:39 PM.

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First thing I would suggest is take out both of the hard drives, then put in one of the hard drives, making sure the jumper is set to MASTER (look on the hard drive itself, usually there is writing on it to show how the jumper should be set for it to be a master, if there is nothing writtent, the just leave the jumper off) and plug it back in. Then boot up your computer and see if the bios recognizes it.

Post back with the details.

[Fenor]

First thing I would suggest is take out both of the hard drives, then put in one of the hard drives, making sure the jumper is set to MASTER (look on the hard drive itself, usually there is writing on it to show how the jumper should be set for it to be a master, if there is nothing writtent, the just leave the jumper off) and plug it back in. Then boot up your computer and see if the bios recognizes it.

Post back with the details.

[Fenor]

Oh, to make you feel better, if you know a friend that has a computer that you can connect your hard drives to as slaves, you can buy good file recovery software, called Recovery My Files for only 69.95. I have used it myself and it recovered 100% of my files. AS long as you haven't written to or formatted the hard drive, then you will be able to get everything back. As long as the hard drives aren't completely dead that is. But for both hard drives to go at the same time is highly unlikely even if they were the same model and purchased at the same time. My bet is there is something wrong with your motherboard from a power surge or something then the hard drives themselves going bad.

Edited by Fenor, 17 September 2005 - 07:56 PM.

[wannabe1]

cleosama...

Fenor's right on track here, but try this first...remove the cable from the slave drive. It would be connected to the center connector on the ribbon. The Master should be on the end connector...make sure the Master HDD is connected to the IDE1 port on the Motherboard. Try to start the machine with IDE1 as Primary Master only. This has worked for me on more than one occasion.

If that doesn't work...move ahead with Fenor's suggestion.

wannabe1

[cleosama]

You guys freaking ROCK!.. my computer is up and running!. *hugs both of you* I've never been so happy in my life.. I thought I was royally screwed.

thankyou thankyou thankyou thankyou THANKYOU!!!!

-chrystal

[Fenor]

GLAD TO HEAR IT!!!

[wannabe1]

Now go get that job you really want!!!

wannabe1

[Fenor]

One thing I would suggest you do is to backup your important files onto a CD now that you have your computer up and running so if something like this does happen again your important stuff is safe and secure.

Fenor

[wannabe1]

cleosama...

We probably oughta mention here that you should now be able to hook up the slave HDD to the center connector on the ribbon (drive jumpered to slave) and it should now also be recognized.....

Good luck on the job of your dreams.....

wannabe1

Edited by wannabe1, 17 September 2005 - 08:45 PM.

[Tyger]

And go through the ads for all the office supplies and computer places and see if you can't pick up an 80gb hard drive for about $40.00 to start putting your files on. And you can get standalone hard drives to plug into the machine and back your files up on and then you can turn it off when you aren't using it so that power surges won't hurt it.