• Welcome to Poasters Computer Forums.
 

News:

Welcome to the ARCHIVED Poasters Computer Forums (Read Only)

Main Menu

Primary HDD is missing - cant start the machine

Started by Llhweiir, November 01, 2009, 04:33 hrs

Previous topic - Next topic

Llhweiir

Yesterday at 23.00 my machine worked fine, I played a bit of Civ3 and then turned it off.

Today I try to turn the machine on, but it refuses to start. When I enter the system settings at startup I can see that the machine finds my secondary 250GB HDD but not my primary 500GB HDD.

All cables seems to be secured, and I think it spins up as usual...

Could it be some kind of virus - considering that last was Halloween in Sweden?

Any ideas on how to resolve the problem? I cant reformat the computer since the partition that contains the recovery data is located on the missing drive...

Llhweiir

Correction: The primary 500 GB HDD does NOT spin up - it is simply dead... I have tried to switch cables with the working 250 GB HDD, but not use - it simply doesn'twant to work.

The drive is a 1 year old Seagate drive that I got  from the seller when the first drive malfuntioned.

pat

Is this a Pata drive or a Sata drive? I've had problems with Sata drives before as even though the cables were connected I still had to jiggle them around some to get a good connection.

Could also try a different power connection and different cables. Also try the drive in a different system.

Maybe take the drive out and look it over, I say that because my sister had a problem with a drive a while back here and when I looked at it I found a burnt spot on the PCB on the drive, that one was toast.

Other than that there are some other things I have heard/read about. Putting the drive in the freezer and/or smacking it to free up the drive head, but I would think those are measures of last resort.

Hopefully you have good backups of data........
SeaSonic S12 550W, Athlon 64 X2 6000+, Asus M2N SLI-Deluxe, nvidia 9600 GSO, 2x2 gig Crucial Ballistix, LG DVD/RW, 2x Western Digital Black Edition 640gb,  SAMSUNG 226BW Black 22", Canon PIXMA MP600,  Logitech X-230 speakers, Logitech Comfort Duo keyboard & Mouse, Windows 7 64 Home Premium & Vista 64

Llhweiir

It is a SATA drive... I will take it out - shake it around a bit and see what happens... Unfortunatelly the last backup is several month old... :-(

Llhweiir

#4
Update: The drive does spin up after all. I have tried all connections possible on the motherboard and all cables  but no success...

Update 2: I have hooked the disc up to my laptop through a USB-cabinet. It does indeed spin up, but the laptop cannot find it either...

scuzzy

My recommendation would have been to try it on another computer, which is what you did.

At this point, you may want to try the "last resort" options that pat mentioned. If you can get it working, you'll want to immediately begin to recover and back up the data.
Antec Performance TX640B Case | WinXP Pro SP3 & Win7 64-bit | Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R | Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale LGA 775 3.16GHz Dual-Core | 8GB (4x2GB) PC6400 G-Skill RAM | eVGA 7600GT 256MB PCI-E | 74GB WD Raptor SATA 16MB Cache | 74GB WD Raptor SATA 8MB Cache | 320GB Seagate Barracuda SATA 16MB Cache | External 640GB WD Caviar SATA 32MB Cache | Sony DRU-V200S DVD/RW | PC Power & Cooling Silencer 500W | Samsung SyncMaster 2494 (24") LCD Monitor | LG Flatron W2361V (23") LCD Monitor

Llhweiir

Problem solved!

I copied the content on my secondary HDD (Samsung 250GB) onto my external Maxtor 160 GB. After that I used the recovery DVD to create a new primary HDD out of the old secondary one...

I have also bought a new WD 500GB drive to replace the lost Seagate.

Data loss is limited to a bunch of e-mails and important but non-essential document... I have had a few crashes over the years and every time I promise myself that will be better at making backups... Somehow I never learn!

Most likely I will invest in a Netger Duo to solve the problem in the future... :-)

pat

Good to see you got it sorted out without too much data lose.
SeaSonic S12 550W, Athlon 64 X2 6000+, Asus M2N SLI-Deluxe, nvidia 9600 GSO, 2x2 gig Crucial Ballistix, LG DVD/RW, 2x Western Digital Black Edition 640gb,  SAMSUNG 226BW Black 22", Canon PIXMA MP600,  Logitech X-230 speakers, Logitech Comfort Duo keyboard & Mouse, Windows 7 64 Home Premium & Vista 64