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...
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.
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........
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... :-(
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...
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.
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... :-)
Good to see you got it sorted out without too much data lose.