For thanuk:200 ways to revive a hard drive(LOOOONG POST)

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Postby Colje » Tue Nov 04, 2003 8:10 pm

200 ways to revive a hard drive

We based one of our most popular pop quiz challenges on a situation every tech support person has faced or will face at least once: a failed hard drive. In that particular case, a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 user was getting errors like "disk 0 error" and "invalid drive specification." Here were the other facts in the case:

· The data wasn't backed up.
· The problem came out of nowhere.
· The user had accessed Setup and tried to manually enter the settings for the drive type when "Auto" didn't work.
· There was no startup disk made by this machine.

Reviving a drive like that one—even if only long enough to copy its data before you throw the drive in the garbage—is a tough challenge. When I asked TechRepublic members how they would troubleshoot a situation like this one, we received over 200 solutions, and we heard from a number of TechRepublic members who wanted to know “what everybody else suggested.” So we decided to publish this collection of over 200 ways to revive a hard drive.

In editing this document, we tried as much as possible to preserve the voices of the TechRepublic members who submitted these solutions. Of course, as the legal blurb at the end of the document declares, we can't promise that any of these tips will work in every setting. But we thought you'd enjoy reading what your fellow IT professionals had to say on this subject. Enjoy!

How to revive a hard drive
Freeze it 2
Drop it 9
Hit it 10
The rest of the solutions 14

Freeze it

From: Travis Standen


From: Thedeedj


From: Itguy1

From: Kelly Reid



From: mpicpu


From: Scott Greving



From: jphillips



From: John Turcotte


From: David Furlow


From: Keri D.

Hard drive revival:


From: Christopher Post

How do you bring a hard drive back to life?

My situation:
Half of a volume set goes south on a WinNT server, no good backup and an angry boss screaming about the data being mission critical.

My solution:
** A bit unorthodox but, it has saved my butt! **
· Turn off the server.
· Take out the failing hard drive and wrap a static bag around it.
· Throw it in the freezer conveniently located in the break room.
· Pray for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
· Leaving the hard drive in the bag, quickly plug the drive back into the server. (Just plug the in cables and go.)
· Cross fingers, turn it on, and move all data off the drive as fast as you can! Then add a tape drive and start backing the dumb thing up!

My so-called logic:
Metal contracts when it is cold.... so the platters shrink and increase the clearance for the read/write heads.

From: Chris Poole

Put the drive in the freezer for about a week and then you can usually get one last read off the drive.

From: Cheyenne Robert Alspach

Here are some drive recovery tricks that have worked for me, in the order that I do them. Try booting the drive and copying the data off after every step.

1. Hold the drive upside down, making gravity change the head geometry ever so slightly. Vertical is also another option.

2. Slightly rap the drive with your knuckle, (but nowhere near hard enough to damage the drive).

3. Try the drive in another machine, (slight drive voltage change assumed to be the miracle worker here).

4. Rap the drive just SLIGHTLY harder than you did above in 2.

5. Freeze the hard drive in the freezer for two hours, and place in a plastic zip lock bag to prevent condensation from forming on the drive when you plug it back into the system, (head geometry, electrical resistance lowered, electrical contact points adjusted, etc., assumed to be the miracle here).

6. After the drive warms up to room temperature or better, rap it even harder with your knuckle this time.

7. Repeat all of above steps on next day, as sometimes I've gotten data off drive simply by trying again.

From: James McLaughlin

Hmmm sounds like a toughy to me. Back in the old days when I first started teching, if we ran into a problem like this, there were only a few ways to deal with it. I will go over these options now:

QUESTION: What do you think you can do about this, Mr. Tech?

First Answe—r—Nothing, your computer is too old, and the data on there is not really of that much importance. If you really want it back, you can get a hold of a company called "Total Recall" out of Denver and get charged thousands of dollars to get your files back. Besides, with Y2K, this machine ain’t gonna run anyway, and prices are so low right now, there is no reason why you should not upgrade now.

2) Well, I can take it back to the shop and pretend like I know what I am doing for 3-6 hours. Then I will call you the for the next week and a half giving you excuses as to why I am not able to get your information off of that hard drive. Of course, I won’t charge you anything, but I will expect compensation for all the time I wasted on your hard drive.

3) I could take the hard drive out of your machine, plug into my Secondary IDE controller, and boot up. Hopefully, I can see your hard drive and have the ability to copy all of your files to a temp folder on my machine called "Your Name." After I collect all information, I would run IBM's WIPE on the drive and then a thorough scandisk, just to see if the cause was sunspot related or not. If......this was not working, then extreme temperatures always have a way of talking older hard drives into giving us what we want. I would then wrap the HD in a Ziplock bag and slam it in the freezer for 12 hours. Pull it out the next day and very quickly plug it into my machine, copying what I can as quickly as possible until the drive dies again, repeating until all files are copied and safe. If.....that don’t work, move onto the extreme heat. A Shrink wrap gun works best, but a hairdryer will do the trick if that is all you have. Wrap one end of the HD in a towel and use the shrink wrap gun or dryer to heat the hard drive. Very quickly plug it in and copy files until finished. Repeat until all necessary files are copied and you are done.

You may not think it works, but when you are down to that as your last does.

From: Lichtenwalner Allen L TSgt

· Carefully remove it from the computer.
· Place it in the freezer for 24 hours, then put it back in the computer. You should have approximately 30 minutes of good spin time left before a fina–l—and much more permanen–t—shut down.
This problem often arises from a catastrophic hard disk crash—bearings are usually the culprit, coupled with badly worn read/write heads. I've used this technique on many computers throughout the last fifteen years as "resident expert" and saved virtually all important data.
If you're in a pinch for time, such as critical data needed for a briefing in twenty minutes, you can opt for the more drastic cooling technique—a C02 fire extinguisher...

From: Jeff Smoley

Here is a solution for really dead drives: ones that won't spin or ones that make those funny grinding noises:

Put the drive in the fridge for a few hours. This can shrink up something inside that might let it run long enough to get critical data. If not, try the freezer for a few more.

This actually has worked for me in the past.

From: Neal Menkus

Things we have done in the past that worked:
1. Remove the drive, grab it, and shake the hell out of it: "What could it hurt? It's not working anyway…."
2. Place the drive in a freezer for about 10 minutes.
3. Open the drive case in a laminar flow-hood, and give it a spin. (Once it was closed up and reinstalled, it worked long enough to suck the data off of it.)
4. Swap the logic board with one on another drive of the same type.

Numbers 1, 2, and 3 worked with older Seagate (which we no longer purchase) drives, which were prone to "stiction" problems. Number 4 worked following an electrical surge (lightning strike), since the data on the platters were still there and OK.

From: Clifford Liles

Depending on the drive failure I have had success with some rather extreme solutions to data recovery.

Symptom: Invalid Drive Specifications
Treatment: Basic Check your cmos battery
Check your IDE cable and connections
Check your jumper settings
Remove all other IDE connections but the drive in question

Advanced Try disk manager software
Try data recovery software
Use a bios upgrade card ($39) and allow it to setup the drive
Look up the drive specifications on the manufacturer’s Web site and plug
them in manually.
Turn Off or On Write Precomp—32bit disk access

Symptom: Drive does not spin up: "Sticktion"
Treatment: Basics Lightly tap the side of the drive case with a screwdrive–r—no power
Lightly tap the side of the drive case with a screwdriver–—power on

Advanced Cold soak the drive: Freeze in a zip-lock bag
Spray drive case with inverted can of canned air
Lightly slap the drive on a desk top: (mild frustration)
Repeated hammering of the drive on a desk top: (last resort—total
frustration only)

Symptom: Invalid media type
Treatment: Basics Boot with a FAT32 Windows 95 boot disk
Sys the drive

Advanced fdisk /mbr
Check for a virus from a known clean boot disk

These are but a few techniques for the doomed platters. These techniques can be used in conjunction with one another to arrive at the desired solution. Lather, rinse, and repeat if necessary.

From: Daniel Philpott

Here is the solutions checklist for this problem:

Tools needed:
· Bootable CD or locked floppy dis–k—Formatted with an OS that can see the file system of the hard drive. DOS is usually the preferred OS for this function with NTFSDOS from Sysinternals for NTFS reads and DOS utilities for diagnostics/repair.
· It should have the ability to boot to and/or see CD-ROM drives, read FAT, FAT32, NTFS, or other common file systems, run common network card drivers and see the network, have disk diagnostic and/or repair utilities, and have antivirus scanning software with current definitions.
· OnTrack Data Adviso–r—A free download from Hard Drive (large capacity)—Formatted for a FAT file system (or whatever is your common file system) and preferably with BeOS as the boot operating system.
· Computer Repair Tool Ki–t—Standard repair tools.
· Freezer–—The one in your kitchen will do quite nicely.

1. The first task to recovering a drive is not at all technical—It is social. Prepare your user for the worst but also explain what the realistic chances of recovery are. Then start collecting information that you will need. Here is what you need to know before starting:
· What is the goal of recovery, returning to the previous state or recovering the data?
· Which is most important?
· What is the client willing to spend on recovery?
· What OS (NT, 95, Linux) and DOS (FAT, NTFS, FAT32) was the system running?
· Where is the computer located?

2. Check the environment: The last question from step 1 is often forgotten and can lead to extensive troubleshooting of a simple problem. Look for an environmental problem that may cause problems for the hard drive. Are there magnets on the computer case close to the hard drive? Is there a fan or heater near the computer? Is a transformer, electrical junction box, or high energy device near the computer (on a floor above or in a nearby wall)? All of these will produce a magnetic (or electromagnetic) field that can cause problems. Equipment that may vibrate the computer even at a very low frequency can cause hard drive heads to skip and jump or even scratch the platters.

3. Turn off the computer, remove the cover, and get ready to the turn the computer on. Then put your ear right next to the drive and power the system on. If you hear any kind of grinding, scratching, or rattling from the drive, turn the computer off as quickly as possible and go to the next step. Otherwise go on to step 5.

4. If the disk has made noise that indicates some sort of mechanical stress, then the problem is the domain of data recovery experts. This is where the client has to make a decision. Do they want to send the drive to a data recovery service, or do they want to destroy the disk in an attempt to recover some data? If the client has information that absolutely needs to be recovered, then send it to the professionals. Remember, you cannot service a hard drive unless you are working in a clean room.


5. If the drive boots to an operating system and you can get to either a network or backup medium, then start copying the most important data off first. Once that data is off, you can back up less important data. The best bet is to listen to your client to find out what absolutely must be recovered.

6. If the client wants to restore the drive to its previous state and continue operating, then you need to do two things to see if this is feasible.
· First, run a virus scan on the drive. Update the virus definitions then scan every file on the computer.
· Second, boot to a floppy-disk-based hard drive utility and run a low-level
bad sector discovery utility.
If both tests pass and the computer boots to the operating system, then your job is done and you are eligible for a pat on the back. Otherwise, continue.

7. If the drive does not boot, then try booting to a bootable CD or a bootable locked floppy disk. If you can see the file system, continue to step 8.

If you can not see the file system, then assess your tools. If you have Hard Drive Mechanic from Higher Ground Diagnostics or Tiramisu from OnTrack, then you can use these to diagnose and recover data. Otherwise, boot to the Data Advisor disk to find out whether data can be recovered. They will recover it or suggest a recovery plan or even require the disk be sent to a data recovery center like OnTrack. The client needs to make the choice as to whether the expense of this solution is worth the recovery of the data.

8. If you can see the file system, then priority actions are:

· Copy the most important data off the drive
· Copy the rest of the data off the drive
· Determine if the drive can be recovered (scan with virus checker and disk utilities)
· Repair the operating system

The best way of doing this is to install your spare hard drive in the computer and boot to either it or the CD/floppy bootable. Copy the important data off first, copy the less important data off next, and then do your diagnostics. If your diagnostics look like the drive is repairable, then go right ahead and repair it.

The reason I suggest BeOS be the boot OS on the hard drive is that it has the ability to mount more file systems than I even knew existed before using it. If you need to access an exotic file system, BeOS 4.5 is almost sure to have a driver available for it. However, the FAT (or FAT16) is the most commonly readable file system around, so generally you will want to transfer data to this file system.

If it becomes apparent that the file system is intact and not infected with a virus (or has had a boot sector virus removed), then you may need to replace the Master Boot Record (MBR) of the drive. Simple. Boot to a DOS disk that has the fdisk utility and run an 'fdisk /MBR' to replace the MBR. Remember, balance the time it takes to restore the operating system against the time it takes to recover data, get a new drive, and install a fresh operating system.

Normally, disk recovery is simply a matter of recovering the data. Returning a drive to its previous state is a goal but may simply be more costly than recovering the data and replacing the drive. How much effort to expend on the process is entirely up to you and the client.

Drop it

From: Bob Matott

Besides the typical use of sys C: to transfer back the system files deleted during "housecleaning" by typical users, I've gotten lucky by turning the drive upside down and setting it on top of the power supply (which seemed to remove "a static charge" that had built up).

Also have used various Disk Manager packages to "talk" to drives with FAT/NTFS corruptions just to recover the data. If drives are being reformatted from an operating system that doesn't want to "fully go away" (can name a few!), the disk manager software has also worked in this scenario many times to get rid of the old and allow you to reformat with the new.

Of course, there's always the "drop it from 4-5" onto a flat hard surface" or "smack the side of the case with the flat of your hand" approaches. Believe it or not, both techniques have worked. Rumor has it that sometimes the heads "stick" to the platters during parking/cooldown.

From: Kenneth Lillemo

Sometimes a hard drive that has been running since nearly forever won't spin up after being shutdown for a while. This can be caused by the heads sticking to the platter. As a LAST resort, I will drop the drive onto a firm surface from approximately eight inches. Inevitably, this will solve the problem and the drive is useable long enough to remove the data. My Sys admin spouse gives me a funny look every time I do it but can't argue with the results.

From: Peter Tello

If the low level diagnostics fail, I declare it officially dead. At that point, I have nothing to lose, so I pull it out and over a thin carpet, drop it 6" squarely on all 4 sides, repeating this 2 or 3 times. I have approximately a 50 percent successful boot-up rate, usually enough to copy the data off and save my behind for not having it backed up in the first place.

From: TDC Tech

This is a one-time fix—long enough to revive HD to get data.
· Take the HD out of the computer and squarely drop it on the closed side of the drive (to your bench) with perhaps a little slam.
· This seems to free up the bearings long enough to copy data off of the hard drive. I have quite a bit of luck, but 90 percent of the time it only works once.

Hit it

From: Karen_Roman

1. Check CMOS settings to make sure the drive setting are what they should be—the CMOS battery could be dead or the user may have changed the settings. A bad hard drive could cause the Autodetect to misread settings.
2. Boot from a floppy disk and run fdisk/mbr to restore the backup copy of the master boot record.
3. Image the drive with drive copy program to a new drive.
4. It’s possible the HDD controller is bad. Try the drive in another machine.
5. Boot from a floppy attach to a network drive or have a secondary drive installed and if you can access the data copy it off to there.
6. The drive could have a stiction problem. Tap it gently on the sides, preferably with a rubber mallet.

From: Alan Gates

As "unscientific" as this sounds, I have found that rapping the drive case a couple of times sometimes allows the drive to come up. I have had several experiences in the past like this. Sometimes the drive is having trouble "spinning up." Obviously, the drive is on its last legs but a rap on the drive case will sometimes free it to spin up. This will allow the system to boot so the data can be backed up before the drive goes into the trash...

From: Bob Barker

I have found on more than a few occasions that older disks can develop a sticking problem. I believe it is a combination of weak motor and surface-to-surface tension between the disk and heads. This problem usually shows up on older disks that have been running a few years (usually 24 hours a day) and then shut down for service or other reasons.
· When you try to start up again, the disk will not spin and you get disk errors trying to boot. After checking for the usual problems (power, cables, jumpers, etc.) and finding that the drive was in fact not spinning, I have had great success jarring the disk with my palm (of my hand, not my PDA). I some times have to be a little more violent to get it to start but I have never had to use a hammer.
· I would be careful using this method if the data on the disk must be recovered at any cost which I would then send to On-Track or some other expensive data recovery company.
· I have found this problem mostly with older servers, but a few weeks ago I ran into the same thing on a two-year-old Compaq IDE drive that was only used a few hours a day.

From: Randy Forston

If the hard drive isn't making noise and when you place your hand on it (not on the PC Board side, but on the metal casing), you don't feel any vibration from the drive, you may have a sticking problem (some older drives with a variety of drive lube no longer used have this problem).

If the above describes the symptoms you're seeing, try rapping around the drive case with the plastic handle of a screwdriver.

This will quite often remedy the stiction and allow the drive to come back up as normal.

From: philn

Hi there,

A few things can be performed on a crashed drive before declaring it DEAD:

1. Touch the drive (or listen to it) to feel whether it's spinning. Some drives gradually suffer from spin-up problem but otherwise work fine once spinning. If it doesn't spin at power up, gently knock on the side the drive once or twice to jump start it. This works best if you knock on the drive approx. one or two seconds after power is applied. Repeat the procedure a few times and add a little more force if necessary. Remember that too much force can permanently damage the drive, but again, you have nothing too lose at this point.

2. If drive spins normally and stays spinning, try listening for irregular sounds emitting from the drive. A series of 'clicking' sound usually signifies multiple bad sectors including the boot sector that can prevent drive from booting. If drive 'Auto Detect' is enabled, make sure that its signature is shown at boot screen. If not, drive is certainly suffered from major hardware failure.

3. Check system's CPU to make sure it's not overheating (CPU can run warm, but should not be hot) due to a failed cooling fan, etc. Overheating the CPU can cause the system to be unbootable or cause the system to reboot itself frequently.

4. You could use another system to test the problematic drive to make sure that the controller is not at fault. Try both "Auto" and "User Type" (where you manually enter the drive's parameters) settings.

5. Try booting with a floppy and run 'fdisk' to view drive information. Some drives suddenly lost all of their data possibly due to corrupted FAT, but otherwise, continue to work fine once initialized and formatted. In many cases, FAT can be restored by executing Norton Utilities from floppy.

If all failed and data from drive must be retrieved, you can try swapping its hardware (drive's main board) with similar working drive. Though this procedure can void drive warranty, but your data is more important, right? Or else, you try services that can save your data from dead drive for a fee.

From: Lyle Giese

Put CMOS back to auto for HD and see if it sees an HD at all. Put in a bootable floppy—can you see the HD? (Don't forget to write protect the floppy in case this was a virus.) Now try EZ-Drive. Some versions (I have several on hand with different advanced options) show what parameters the hard drive is set to in CMOS and what parameters the drive was formatted with. The second set is important. Sometimes the BIOS doesn't auto correctly.

Listen to the HD. If it powers up normally by sound (no strong thumping sound) and the platters seem to spin up, you still have a chance. If the drive spins up and then down or if it emits a strong thumping sound, the hard drive is toast and only a professional recovery company with a clean room can help.

If the HD doesn't spin up at all, occasionally you can gently slam it down to get stuck platters unstuck and it will spin up long enough to back up your data. The HD is toast physically at this point, and it needs to be replaced before trying the slam technique. There were also a few older HDs that had the flywheel exposed, and you could nudge it slightly and they would spin up long enough to back up the data. Again these are last resort techniques and you ARE planning on replacing the HD anyway.

From here, one of several software products are available to assist you as long as the drive spins up physically to assist the technician. Most of these products can read drives with damaged FAT tables or missing sectors.

And it could be just a simple matter of losing the Active attribute for the partition! Also, viruses can cause this by blasting the partition table, and some of the professional revival products can assist from here.
Good luck!

From: Christopher Tolmie

· If the drive is not spinning up on power-on, I'll lightly rap on the side of the drive enclosure with the handle of a screwdriver while listening for the platters to begin to spool-up.
· If it doesn’t spin up, I'll increase the pressure of each rap until it does start spinning. I've gone to the extreme of picking up an externally mounted full height 5.25" disk drive and slamming it continuously on the desk while it was starting up.
· I did this for over six months until the drive finally died completely, but I did extend its life and it never had corrupt data on it. Of course, it was all backed up. If the drive won't spin, then you aren't going to recover the data.
· You can you a third-party utility like RESCUE that reads the drive directly using its own operating system and saving individual files and directories to another drive. I've recovered entire drives this wayI—it is time consuming but it works. When all else fails, send it to the professionals.
· Search the Web to find different companies that specialize in rebuilding the drive, but expect to spend mucho dinero.

From: Craig Shipaila

Before you do the following, make sure that the controller is not the problem or a cable on backwards, etc., by taking the drive out of the computer and putting into another one to see if it’s the computer causing the problem. If the other items have been checked, then do (what we call) the slam test.

If the drive is dead the only thing you can really do is:
1. Find out if the person needs any important info that you might be able to get off of computer.
1a. If person has data they cannot live without and the drive is not running, take the drive out of the computer and slam it down to the desktop to get the motor running. Nine out of 10 times, this will get the motor running long enough to get data. If needed you can also send the drive into a White Room to have them get the info.

From: Joseph Bruno

Actually, the solution isn't mine. We had several Dell PCs and the C drive went out on one (with no current backup, of course). The Dell tech came out with a new drive but the warranty didn't include data recovery for which they wanted a $5,000 deposit and offered no guarantees.

I asked the tech if there was anything we could do on our own to get the drive to spin up so we could get a backup. "Well", he replied, "there is one thing I've done that sometimes unsticks the drive." He then took the drive out and slammed it flat down on the desk as hard as he could. After putting it back in the drive, it spun up. I was advised to back up the data before shutting down the system as "the slam" doesn't always work and seldom works a second time.

Fortunately, once was enough in this case. The data was backed up to a portable tape drive and the C drive was replaced and restored.

From: Sam Espana

I have used several ways to solve the same issue. The reason is the fact that a hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive, or is it? The answer is NO. If a hard drive is failing it’s usually because it is legacy equipment that often doesn't even support LBA mode. But, sometimes it isn't even the hard drive that’s causing the problem. Say what? That's right.

By in large, I first approach this situation by asking the user how much hard drive space he/she used to have. Usually the answer is over 512 megabytes. But, again, you'll be surprised.

Secondly, I ask the user if this is the first time this situation has occurred and whether or not he/she knows if we are dealing with a new or old computer.

Armed with the above answers. I usually solve this problem by performing a combination of the tasks described below.

1) Test the motherboard BIOS/CMOS battery. Often, the hard drive is just fine. But, the internal battery is dead. Some computers like a few Packard Bells I have dealt with have LBA and 32-bit mode turned off by default. Those settings may have been enabled during assembly, but now that the battery is dead they are set back to factory settings (when the user turns his/her computer off) rendering the hard drive inaccessible. Solution: Change the internal battery and enable CMOS LBA/32-bit mode.

2) Ask if the computer has been moved recently. Often, when computers are moved, data cables are detached from hard drives and/or motherboards. Obviously, without a data or power cable, a hard drive will never work. Solution: Reattach cables and be prepare to actually replace them.

3) Worst case scenario. It is the hard drive that does not seem to respond. Then, replace the hard drive with a new Master drive and install the faulty drive as a Slave drive. Make sure you install the same Operating System used by the Slave on the Master. Then, proceed to probe the Slave drive. Ideally, at this point you should use diagnostics tools such as Micro-Scope from Micro2000. If you have experience, you should not close the computer box making sure that the Slave drive is within reach. Twice, I have been able to restart a hard drive after gently banging on it (once as Slave and once as a Master.) Don't miss the boat. Even if you happen to restart the faulty Slave drive, you must copy your info to the Master so that you are not placed in the same situation again because the next time you may not be as lucky. The above procedure works whether the drive is an IDE or SCSI drive. However, when using SCSI hard drive, you may have to test the SCSI card as well. I am leaving now to fix a drive that belongs to a RAID pack because it seems to be out of the scope of this drive quiz.

From: Earle Pearce

When a drive is really gone—cannot be read at all—due to a physical failure, I employ a trick that has yet to fail me.

1. Install the replacement as an additional drive.
2. Remove the bad drive and smite it firmly on both edges (bang it on something solid)!
3. Reinstall it, reboot, and it will work long enough to get the data copied to the replacement drive.
4. I haven't had the opportunity to check this step yet but I think it should work. If it's the boot drive that's bad, mirror the boot partition to the replacement drive, then break the mirror, remove the bad drive rejumper, and boot to the new one.

The rest of the solutions

From: Scott Wittell, MCP A+

I had to laugh when I saw this easy fix, and it does work. We were able to bring back a failed drive in an older HP server running NetWare 4.11. First step is to remove the drive from the machine. Second, hold the drive flat in your palms. Third, shake the drive a few times in an up-and-down motion, like you're trying to hammer a nail. Don't let the drive hit the floor though. I've used this technique on numerous occasions, works every time.

From: Colle Davis

The Hair Dryer Method

For the last resort (when the drive really did die, it-is-not-even-spinning type crashes), there is a possible solution that comes from the early days of hard drives. Back then you were not supposed to turn them off—I don't know why but IBM said never turn them off unless you are standing there.




From: John B


From: Tony

A. Dead system—System "A"
B. Known working system—System "B"



Step 3. REMOVE...DISABLE if onboard.... all un-needed devices from System A...modem, sound card...etc.
NOTE: Label HD ribbon cables A and B before removal from systems. "A" for System "A" and "B" for System "B")

Step 4. Remove from system A and B the HD, and ribbon cable that connects it to the motherboard...(MB)

Step 5. Swap drive and cables from B to A and connect to MB. If boot then controller on MB "A" is good (See step #6.) If No-boot then MB controller is bad.... replace MB.

Step 6. Return HD's and cables to original systems, Remove HD ribbon cables from both systems, swap B for A and boot...If boot then ribbon cable on A is bad...replace. If No-boot then... Balance your check book, and get out the sale've got bigger problems!!

From: Eddie N.


From: Paul W.

Dead disk drives?

1) Check your Master/Slave/Standalone jumper settings and make sure they are correct and don't conflict with another device on the same IDE channel.
2) Check for bent pins on the connectors.
4) Try a known good drive on your IDE channel and check the channel. If it doesn't respond:
· Try another IDE port (if there's two)
5) Try the disk in another PC.
8) She's dead, Jim. How fast can you type?


From: Daniel F.


From: Miles H.

· Check cables are on and are the correct way round.
· Check Bios setting for Model of PC is current. Download latest version if necessary.
· The options here would be to have the 'faulty' disk as the master or slave depending on your situation.
· If installed and works as master, ghost the image to the network.
· They may have some low-level disk checking/repairing software.
· If all else fails, then you'd have to chalk it up as experience and hopefully someone would learn to ensure sufficient backup procedure were implemented.

From: Lawrence Shipinski

Easy, go to Maxtor's Web site or Seagate Web site and download the utility software. It's free. Please back up whatever you can first!

From: Jake G.

Well, I'm kind of new to this, but I'll throw my hat in the ring.


Try rebooting.

If that doesn't work, put the Quick Restore disks in, reboot, and exit to DOS when you get the chance (I don't remember the exact steps to that). Now, depending on how this QR was put together, you may have to change to a virtual –drive—possibly N: and then the TOOLS directory. You may be able to do this straight from the A: or C: prompt. Run the command FDISK /MBR and reboot.


From: Gordon G., IT Manager


1. Return the BIOS to the original state. If "auto" for hard drive then "auto,” otherwise to "user defined" with LBA enabled for Microsoft's operating systems.
2. If the system still doesn't boot off the hard drive, then boot off a write-protected bootable floppy using the same operating system and version as what is on the C: drive.
6. If the drive boots, you're almost done. If not, then reboot off the diskette and scan the drive for errors. Reinstall the operating system without formatting the drive.
7. If the drive makes any unusual sounds or doesn't spin, then your best option is to send the drive to a data recovery agency. Attempting to recover data from a physically damaged disk usually results in further damage to the drive and little chance of recovering any data later. The best question to ask here is "What is your time and data worth?"
8. In step 6, I said that if the drive boots you're almost done. What's left? Make that recovery diskette, make a backup of the drive and thoroughly scan the hard drive for any physical errors. Perform the scan last, since the drive may fail during a scan if there are any physical problems with the drive mechanism.

From: Traci N Thrash


2. Try "Auto config" to set the drive type.
3. If "Auto config" does not find the correct drive type, you have two options:
· Use a disk utility to read the specs off of the drive.
· If not, try to "shock" it by setting it flat upon the table top, applying power, and rapping it on the side a couple of times with a plastic-faced hammer or handle of a screwdriver. Don't be afraid to rap it pretty good, these little guys are pretty sturdy nowadays, and worst already have a broken drive! (Often you will hear the drive spin up immediately.) Time to BACK UP (Grab the data and run).

In every case, back up the data the minute you see anything that even looks like a directory. Have a drive ready to put it on. I like to have a disk drive connected to my test machine and put everything there ASAP. You might be advised to use the "new" drive that will go into the user's machine. Don't put the "bad" drive back unless you just like to make service calls over again. These steps have made me a hero more than once on my 17 years as a PC tech and/or salesman. Hope they work for you.
From: Geoff G.


the following steps:


From: Chris Heizmann


3) Switch to drive c:\.

II. If the drive does not work at all.

· 1) Open up the case.
· 2) Locate and remove the Hard Disk Drive.
· 4) Re-install the drive and start the PC.
· 5) If the PC boots to Windows, backup all data files via MSbackup.

From: David A. Hunt

· Check all cables and connections (Power, EIDE, or SCSI).
· Turn on the Power and correct the BIOS.
· Watch for failures such as controller failure during bios check.
· Listen for unpleasant noises (after head crash).
· If the PC won't boot from disk, use a boot disk in the floppy and establish if drive C is available.
· If not, try Fdisk and see if a drive is visible (if not, it's starting to look bad...).
· Revive the boot block, and try booting from the drive again.
· If the drive wasn't visible, then remove the drive and try to revive it in another PC.
· Sometimes removing the drive and gently shaking it can help to revive it if the user hasn't been using his PC on a regular basis, especially in older PCs.

From: Mauri Presser

· Check the CMOS setup for drive settings.
· If an auto detect drive option is there, use it.
· Save the settings and reboot.
· If it does not spin, shut down the computer.
· If one was on one, then physically remove the drive and FIRMLY holding on to it, twist your wrist in an attempt to break the "sticktion" (bearings stuck) free.
· Hook the drive back up and power up to a boot floppy.
· If not, try Norton Disk Doctor or equivalent to try and recover the partition.
· If not, back to Norton Disk Doctor.
· If this does not work, it's time for Ontrack or other data recovery service (if the client will pay!). Good hunting!!

From: Karl DeGraff

The most successful methods I have used are:

2. Go to the drive's manufacturer's Web site (or use a drive parameters database) to get the actual physical drive parameters.
4. Cable the ailing drive to the surrogate computer's secondary IDE channel using a reasonably long IDE cable (see reason for long cable below).
5. If the drive does not spin during power up when it should (note that some SCSI drives have delayed spin ups), take the drive, hold it in the fingertips of both hands (spider on a mirror style), and rotate the drive's casing around the disk platters inside suddenly (the reason for the long IDE cable). The most effective motion is to prepare by rotating slowly to a starting position where your fingers are turned "up toward" your chest as far as is comfortable for you wrists, then suddenly rotate "down out" from your chest as far as is comfortable, and then immediately snap back to the original position. This technique works by moving the casing with respect to the platters based on the principle of inertia and will often allow a drive with "frozen" bearings to spin up one more time. Do not expect this technique to work twice!
8. If the computer does not recognize the drive, especially if set to Auto, go to the BIOS and set the drive parameters to the manufacturer specified values and reboot. If still no recognition, try adjusting the values for sector translation. There are several options for the primary translation type (Normal, LBA, Large, etc.), but please note that there may be other settings that also effect drive communications. These other settings usually have values of Yes/No. Some of these other settings are "large drive" (note there are many different names for this setting), "enhanced mode,” and "block mode.” The important thing is to try different combinations of any of the settings that effect hard drive communications for the second IDE channel. Hint, make a list of all of the possible combinations and check off each one as you try it.
9. Most important, try not to let anything (e.g., operating system or "fix-it" programs) mess with the disk contents until you have exhausted all other avenues of access. These programs are great, but should be reserved as the first line of defense against software corruption and the last resort for hardware corruption. If your problem is a hardware issue, these programs will usually "finish the job" in terms of denying you the possibility of recovering you data. Only use them AFTER the hardware problem has been corrected.

From: Dan Miley

I've had this happen before, and one thing that worked for me involved the following:

The Hard Disk Assembly (HDA) is usually separate from the IDE controller board. If the controller board is the bad part, the data is still good, you just cannot get to it. The symptoms for this are: Disk not spinning up at all, "drive not found," or "no boot disk available" type messages.

I've swapped the data module (HDA) from the bad drive controller to a good replacement drive. Usually it's just 4-6 screws and a couple small cables. Use static care procedures as always when working with computer parts.


From: Jack Ho







From: Robert K. Kuhn

Since you did not state what kind of hard drive this is (MFM, RLL, SCSI, ESDI, IDE/EIDE), I'm going to assume IDE/EIDE.

An "Invalid Drive Type" error usually means that the wrong drive type has been selected in CMOS. I am also going to assume that the BIOS/CMOS supports this hard drive s
Posts: 157
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2002 6:01 am
Location: Tønsberg,Norway

to be continued

Postby Colje » Tue Nov 04, 2003 8:33 pm

From: Robert K. Kuhn







5. Sometimes with an "Invalid Drive Type", you can actually boot with a floppy (assuming that the drive is not an NTFS, HPFS, LINUX, Novell NetWare or some other format....) and then access the hard drive. If
this can be done, this might be one way to back up any data. You can set up the "bad" drive as "slave" and then with a new drive formatted with whatever format is needed, copy over whatever data that can be read on the "bad" drive.

Back in the good old days, when we had a drive that went beyond the 1024 cylinders (which is 99.99 percent of all the IDE/EDIE drives made since 1992 and on), we had to "trick" the BIOS/CMOS. This was done by taking the cylinders, dividing the number in half, and then doubling the heads:



One last attempt, and I doubt that it will work but it's worth a shot, would be to get Symantec's Ghost or PowerQuest's Drive Image. A trial copy can be downloaded from their site. See if a drive-to-drive image
can be made (from the old "bad" drive to the "new" replacement drive). However, Ghost and Drive Image must be able to read the "bad" drive's partition. One could look into a sector-by-sector copying tool. Back in the late 80s, I had one but for the life of me can't remember who wrote it. But I remember it was shareware. Gibson research, perhaps (the makers of SpinWrite, an excellent utility for it's time...)

If the data is that important (mission critical), a drive recovery center would have to deal with it. But be prepared to pay for it! We've had to use a local data recovery center (Hard Disks Only) and Gibson Research in the past to rebuild a bad drive. Not cheap but would have cost us more had we not been able to recover the data. Gibson Research is perhaps the best out of the two we've dealt with.


Again, I am assuming that the drive is an IDE/EIDE. If it's an MFM, RLL, ESDI or SCSI, then the tactics would differ slightly as each are set up and controlled differently. But since IDE/EIDE is perhaps the popular and most used drive, I am going to assume that is the drive.

From: Jim Davison


I would use the following steps even considering that you state the user had "Tried" to manually enter the settings in setup and also tried auto. The user may not know what they are doing. I also would not trust the error codes. I would assume the error codes are only letting us know there is a problem but would not trust the codes to give an accurate description of what the problem is.

If no, then I would go to step 2.

If you still have a problem, go to step 3.

3. Other Drives are bad and interfering with the boot disk


5. CMOS or Flash problem

From: Ron Charity


From: Phil Murphy


From: Shawn Cole

· Get a second Hard Drive larger than the current broke or fairly non-functioning one.
· Make Disk #1 OLD Drive Slave and the new one Master because you want the new one to become your Primary Boot Drive.
· Format and FDISK the New Drive into one or two partitions. I do two for personal reasons, Format c: so it's bootable.
· Go buy a program called LOST & FOUND V1.0 from under software, disk utilities from the company POWERQUESTCORPORATION found at ... CORPORATIO for a price of $55.95 and follow the instructions in the book to the letter.
· Restart machine with the L&F disk in and follow the on screen prompts, and it will COPY all the data you choose. When it’s complete, it will give you a report of success and/or failure on particular files.

And as long as the hard drive is not physically destroyed, you will be able to copy over all the recoverable data . The nice thing about this is it COPIES only—no writing to the messed-up drive. I used this very successfully on a drive that the FAT became corrupt on and would not ID or boot up on.

From: Tomer Har Nesher

Hi, I have three ideas:
2) We found some problems with hard drive that happen after few minutes of work. In this case, you should disconnect the hard drive from power (by turning off the machine) for few minutes, then turn it on and back up immediately until it will be warm again and you'll not be able to read the data. Do it until you'll have all files copied.
3) If you have same drive (SAME MODEL), you can replace the unreachable disk's main board and trying to read the data.


· I checked to see if there are any viruses that affected the Fat table of the drive, and then I used a hard drive that was sys'ed and set the other one as slave. I was able to read the partition and copy the data over. If that didn't work use ex: Norton disk doctor or any other disk examiner and see if that was able to correct the problem. Run it off the first hard drive.

From: Darren Brown
Hmmm....gotta hate those hard drive problems.....

"The sounds of the game"

"Put the right spin on things"
Next, is the drive spinning when you turn the computer on? If it isn't, check the power cable to the drive. If that was fine, tap the drive lightly on the side to see if it spins up. Sometimes that works (if it does, back it up and order a new drive immediately!). I encountered a drive that acted like this a year ago. If you kept tapping it, it kept spinning. So, for three hours, I sat there tapping this drive until I got all the company's accounting data off of it. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices for your customers.

"Something SCSI this way comes"

"Back to the Bios"
If the drive is spinning and the cables are properly seated, check the "Detect IDE Hard drives" in the bios. For some reason, on some of the older motherboards, it will pick up a drive that "AUTO" won't pick up.

"Swap meet"

"Third Party!!!"

"Never believe everything you hear!"
One thing to remember, listen to the problem the customer has, but find your own solution! I fell into that trap once "I tried this and that,” and yet, after a couple of hours of painful work, I tried the customer’s solutions, too. Sure enough, the customer may have tried those solutions, but he didn't do them properly.


I really hope these help you out.

From: Rod Lee



From: Michael Dal Lago

Maybe try the following;



From: John Dalnes

Already had this one this week. User deleted and wouldn't boot. Tomorrow's presentation on the drive. Installed as secondary master in another machine and transferred data to the server. Reformatted and back online the next day.

From: John Callison

2. Try hard drive as slave in another computer.

From: Jim Burns

Check or swap the power supply to see if it's putting out the proper voltage. This can give a disk failure message during bootup.

From: Bailey, Vince


From: William Perry




From: Robert Hird


From: Bill E. Garity


From: Sprynet

· If the I/O controller is fine, the hard disk is receiving power, then I boot from a diskette. I always keep DOS diskettes in all versions (5.0, 6.0, 6.22).
· Try to access C:\>
· If it doesn't work, I try the setup program again. Auto configure will not work? I use USER and type in the parameters written on the hard disk (of course I have to open the machine to find out). If it still doesn't wor–k—if when I enter C:\ the computer returns "Bad command ..." or "Invalid drive...,” or anything for that matter, I will try Norton utilities or another third-party hard disk utility.

From: Dan Nicolay

2. Can attempt to manually configure drive in bios–—open case and get heads, cylinders, etc., if bios won't auto detect.
If that fails…

A Ghost image can either be sent to another drive in a system or using a boot disk or with network protocols (copied to a network drive). With the "ghost" image, you can check the drive and start over if the failure is not drive hardware related.

From: C L Gillies

2. If this does not work, order Symantec's Ghost and make a clone.
Hope this works. Of course, you could try reinstalling the operating system after formatting but you'd lose all data without a backup.

From: Dave Adams· The first thing I would do is ask the user what system he/she normally booted to.
· If it still did not autodetect, I would try my spare test hard drive.
· If my spare worked, I would test the user's original hard drive in another computer.
· If it was an NT machine, hopefully the user had a NT Emergency Boot Disk specific to that unit and I would use it and go the "Repair" route.

From: Brad Lewandowski

· Use Interlnk and Intersvr and start a xfer
· Maybe the MBR is bad, try copying one over with Sys command...
· God forbid you should send the drive to a 'Data Recovery' place...

From: P. Christensen

· If the machine finds the hard drive, go in and do a virus scan. If the battery made the bios lose the info, you shouldn't shut off the machine until the hard drive data files are backed up. Monkey B virus will alter the boot sector and make the hard drive disappear.

From: Murray Voight· You need to be able to boot into the system.
· First get a generic boot disk that will allow this.
· If you can't access the files, then try running a scandisk from the boot floppy.

From: Howard J. Castello

Boot from floppy drive and then try running fdisk/mbr.

From: Andrzej Bednarz
· First, I would try to approach the problem by distinguishing if it is a hardware or software issue. If the problem is software-related, for example, the operating system is corrupted, the hard drive can be attached as a "slave" and the important data copied to the "master" bootable drive. Many times that approach can be used even for hardware-related problems, for example, when the hard drive is getting flaky, but it's not broken yet.
· It is a lot easier to prepare yourself for the broken hard drive, but to really motivate yourself for any preventive steps, you'd have to answer the question: would I be still OK if my hard drive crashes today? Also, how much time do I want to spent for a data and/or system recovery?
· When you test everything and you're sure that everything is the way you want, you can take an image of your hard drive by using Norton Ghost.
· For the files that you create from now on until next computer crash, create a folder called "data" and in that folder subdirectories for MS Office, PhotoShop, etc.
· From now on, all you have to do is to backup your "data" directory to the CD and copy the Ghost image to the second CD, and if you need to restore your system, it would take you anywhere from 5 to 20 min to have everything back where it was.

From: Mike Fogarty


In past situations, I have successfully accessed a damaged drive by "replacing the drive.”


Step 2 Install the "NEW" drive (a drive of the same type, and manufacturer).

What has happened?


From: Tron

My business is built on 100 percent On-Site Service. I carry most everything in my van that a 'shop' would have. I have a power inverter for AC power and two network-ready systems at my disposal for backing up customer data or to use as a loaner. Anything to get the customer back in business.

First: I boot from a floppy and run a program called "IDEID" that will identify the drive. I then compare these results with what is in the BIOS. I also will see if the BIOS can automatically and correctly identify the drive. If not, I use the user-defined fields.
B.) If C is not ther–e—I carry a few older hard drives with various boot managers on them. I'll make my drive master and boot from it letting my boot manager load. This would allow me to see their drive if I used the right boot manager.
C.) If no boot manager is being used, and C is not present, I use Norton's "NDD/REBUILD" to recover the dos partitions. NOTE: ALWAYS MAKE THE UNDO DISK!
Third: With C back, I'll identify the version of Dos/Win9X on the system—I carry boot files for all versions back to MS-DOS 3.3.
Fourth: Boot off of C if possible, "SYS C:" if it is not possible, Reboot!
Fifth: I use Drive Image to Dupe to an image on a 8.4 GB (remember the 8.4-GB limit!) drive that I carry with me. I let the customer put in a password so they feel secure in my not looking at their data. The above is predicated on the fact that the drive will spin up. If it doesn't, I sometimes have luck in placing the drive upside-down. Sometimes, I'll quickly spin my wrist when I turn the power on. The upside-down mostly worked on the ST1120A/ST3120A drives (Seagate 120M). I have no definitive answer as to why. The ST138R had a problem with what I call "STICTION.” This is my opinion, Seagate! I theorize that the armature would get stuck between the poles of the magnetic fields. In any case, those days are mostly gone.
This is usually the extent that I go to. After this, the customer must decide if the data on the drive is worth the cost of the recovery. I end by selling the customer a new drive and restoring their data from the image. This is usually on a second visit since I don't make it a habit of stocking drives for sale in my van.

From: Peter Becker

This has worked about 6-8 times over the last 5 years...
I have found the drive is not spinning...
You may have to repeat 2-3 times. It works for a while...
This appears to be more of a problem with old Laptops.

From: Bill Rankin

1. First some background info is needed:



3. If A. is yes, and C. is NTFS; try a new hard drive as C:, load a new NT/NTFS system, and access the "dead" NTFS drive as the D:. Sometimes the hard drive's onboard controller can fail, yet be chained to another's board a là master/slave mode. Copy the data off ASAP and ditch the old drive to avoid the temptation to keep it as spare storage.




7. Last, but not least, PREACH TAPE BACKUPS!


From: Jon Torbert

Well, things are a little ambiguous here. Do we know that we are working on the Compaq Prolinea 4/66? Since it didn't specify, I will keep this somewhat general.
· If none are found, get the drive make and model number and go to the company's Web site and get the parameters. Now go back into CMOS and enter the proper settings for your HD. Hopefully this will solve the problem since it was mentioned that the person had been in trying to input the setting themselves.
· If the drive still won't boot, and you are getting a "non system disk" error, I have found that sometimes you can copy the program onto your startup disk (I keep a generic boot disk around with various files like fdisk,,, etc on it.) and at the A: prompt type sys c: which transfers the system files to the HD.

From: Ronald E Rietz







7.) If you can do a DIR, try booting up your machine normally. It may be possible to copy directories and files across to your new drive. Give priority to the user's data such as mail files, data files, settings, and similar. You probably want to try copying the registry files as well.


9.) If there are any bad spots on the suspect disk, try repairing them with the vendor's diagnostic tools.


From: Tom Hayes

Recently we had a user with a Tecra 520 CDT lose his hard drive. It could have been a surge or some other problem but the electronics of the drive wouldn't work. We simply ordered a new identical drive and exchanged the electronics board connected to the drive, and we were able to access the drive to recover the 250-MB mail file the user had to have recovered.

From: Raymond S Cross

Not all hard drive problems are hard drive problems. I had a situation like this just recently. Computer booted with a 'fixed disk 0 failure'. Turns out the drive itself was okayI—it was a motherboard problem, possibly a bad IDE connector. I had recently put in a new motherboard, so I swapped the old one back in and the hard disk worked fine!

From: hhewel


From: Coy Thorp

First thing I would do is eliminate possible problem areas.
· Hopefully, I'd be able to get a drive letter and boot up to recover data.
· If neither of these work (and you're usually lucky if they do), then it's time to boot to a virus scan floppy and scan the boot sector for viruses.
· If there are none, then I'd move to a third-party utility, like NDD, and give that a whirl. If all of those fail, then I send it out to a data recovery center and drop 1,200 bucks of my company's money to recover data that the developer should have backed up in the first place.

From: Jeffery Aronson


From:Tim Danner

· Make sure you put the drive type back to Auto in the CMOS. Then listen to hear if the drive is even spinning up. If the drive isn't spinning up, you can try the old tap technique to try and wake up the drive. If you are able to wake the drive, have the user backup important files immediately. Then replace.
· If the dive is spinning but it still isn't seen by the POST, then you need to try and locate a drive of the same make and model. Swapping the controllers on the two drives may allow you to access the data.

From: Steve Summers


From: Chris



Also, try replacing the IDE cable(s) to eliminate the possibility that there is a bad cable. If the error still happens, then the hard drive has probably failed. There is a remote chance that using MaxBlast or a similar hard drive utility from its manufacturer will at least identify and hopefully repair the problem. Otherwise...remember hindsight is always 20/20. Especially after you lose data...

From: Salman Siddiqui




From: Thomas Bounds

· The problem could be related to the HDD controller. Try replacing it. I could rant for a long time on other solutions, but I don't have time to get into it that deep.

From: William Maxwell

Hard drive failures can result from a number of causes.
· First line of business is to talk with the client: Was the machine recently moved? Were any boards recently installed? A cable may have come loose during one of these operations. Check external causes, e.g. loose and/or oxidized connectors. Don't discard the possibility of little rodents–—I've seen flat cable gnawed through by these little critters.
· Don't forget to check the power cable to the drive–—no juice, no data.

From:Mark Householder


From: 2K Designs

This always works for me..

From: Michael O'Quin


From: James D. Patton Jr.
I'd add another HDD as master and the questionable drive as slave.
· Boot off the good drive and try accessing the bad one.
· If the bad drive is accessible then I'd install whatever O/S the user had previously on the bad drive. Once the O/S is installed, go to the bad drive to recover any data needed.
If the bad drive wasn't able to be seen as master, then I'd try once more to access the drive using SETUP to add the drive specs according the manufacturer.
· If this still doesn't work, then they are out of luck.

P.S. I'd also put a password on the setup to make sure that any new drives won't be changed accidentally—ssince users never make mistakes. It's always the software or hardware to blame.

From: Dave Cason
–P.S. Or if you're bored, swap motherboards. Heck, a few years ago for fun we swapped platters on Seagate ST-251 and it worked! (grin) If it's sticktion, grab the drive & crack it! There's lots of ways you can play!

From: Tony DeVos

· If the setup is working, then we must look at the hard drive itself.
· When powered up, does the drive spin?
· Does it just sit there and "click, click, click?” If it spins, it could be controller failure.
· Can you obtain another controller for this drive and swap it? Try it again.
· If the drive does not spin, it could be a symptom of "stiction.”
· Remove all mounting hardware that is securing the drive to the system.


From: Karl Andrzejewski

· Boot with a Windows 98 startup disk.
· Get the CD-ROM support.
· Copy any critical files to the ZIP, format the hard drive.

From: Brad Marin


From: Larry L. McNeese


From: Jeff Wilson


With the current pricing on hard drives, I don't fight with drives any more, I pull out my copy of Lost and Found by Power Quest and let it detect the drive.
· I reboot and rerun (LF) and let it backup the drive.



From: Bruce D. Meyer

· Move the defunct hard drive to secondary slave, or master or whatever is unused—but don't hook the IDE cable up yet.
· (Precaution) Install a new hard drive as primary master set it to 'ACTIVE.' With fdisk, format, install Windows, power down, hook IDE cable up to the defunct HD, reboot, set BIOS to show the drive, and then copy all the files (data files only please!) over from the defunct HD to the new one. Power down, remove HD, change bios to reflect no HD there, and you’re done.
· Also, you can use EZ Drive, GHOST, or one of several other software methods to copy or mirror the hard drive. If you have bad sectors on the original, you'll quite likely have bad data on the new drive where the bad sectors were on the old.
· If the old drive won't spin up, or can't be recognized in BIOS whatsoever, power down and up (Power completely off each time) relentlessly until is it detected (BIOS set to AUTO for that drive). You will possibly get lucky once in 30 boots.
· (Thermal deficiency may cause it to fail when hot.) In the same vein, if it is cool, then let it just sit there with power on it for thirty minutes, then just reboot for about 30 times (Don't power down.) This may work too.
Of course, let's do first things last.
· Simply removing the CD ROM from the IDE cable was all it took to prove this point, and fix the computer. (Hey! HD is fineI—it's the CD that is tying up the IDE bus and IRQ/DMA controller!) No data loss.

From: Joel Yalung

· Make sure it's not loose.
· Or check the ribbon itself—make sure it still good.
· This usually solves the "invalid drive specification" and "BIOS Auto HD detection not finding the HD."

From: Troy Schlueter

Is the drive spinning? If not, then:
· Remove the drive and connect it back up outside the case.

Last resort—send out to a data recovery business.

From: stan

Depends on why it's dead. On older drives, it was quite common for the heads to stick to the platter. It would not have the torque to start, so it couldn't work.
· If the drive spins and has a problem with the logic board, it's sometimes possible to swap the electronics without opening up the disk cavity, but that's a last resort.

From: Michael Wagoner

Obvious checks are:
· Make sure all the cables are properly and firmly attached.
Assuming all of the above is intact and you've narrowed the problem down to that ONE particular hard drive as having the problem (and that ONE hard drive DOES spin up), I'll tackle it from the perspective that the machine was running either Win95 or Win98 (the steps for both are similar).
· I would bring a startup disk from a Win98 machine to start with (make sure you have the correct startup disk type FAT 16 for machines fdisked that way FAT 32 for machines fdisked that way If the 'owner doesn't know which it was, chances are high it was FAT 16, especially on older machines).
· If it did not recognize the hard drive, I would try to manually input the hard drive settings (some CMOS's allow this, others make it a bit harder to do).
· Now try to boot without the boot disk.

Assuming that one of the above methods at least got the hard drive recognized, but at boot up there is some other error regarding the hard drive, I'd stick in the boot disk and boot with it.
Next question is at this point can/does the machine "see" the hard drive. I've had both cases, some where it did, some where it didn't. If it sees the hard drive, can I see my information? If yes, can I access the information? Usually one of those two questions is a no.

· Now pull out the boot up disk and try to reboot again. Any luck? If so you may be in business, if not you're hosed.

I've tried, with mixed success, using Powerquest's Lost and Found program to try to retrieve data from a hard drive. It's hit and miss enough that it will depend on budget and how "important" the information is before I try to recover it. We just had a hard drive crash that we sent out to have the information retrieved, at $125 an hour it was expensive to recover.

Those are my solutions, for what they are worth.

From: richarr

This has happened here several times.
Very rarely does this procedure not work for me.

From: KC Freels

· Try putting the drive in another machine. It may come up there.
· Put it in as a second drive and boot from a working drive.
· Try and access it then. Fa
Posts: 157
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2002 6:01 am
Location: Tønsberg,Norway

and some more....

Postby Colje » Tue Nov 04, 2003 8:44 pm

From: KC Freels

· Try and access it then. Failing that, try using a program like Ghost and image the drive onto another one. If this works, you're really lucky.
· If the motor is stuck, or the drive isn't spinning right, open the top of the drive (it's dead anyway) and spin the platters using the spindle.
· Sometimes this will get the drive spinning and usable one last time.
· It will never work again though, so this is a last resort.

From: David Chambers





Of course, the boot floppy method works for about 75 percent of the failures. If the boot floppy fails, I try using FDISK/mbr to rebuild the Master Boot Record. This is successful 5-10 percent of the time. Since the user mentioned in the quiz had messed around with the BIOS, it's possible the settings are wrong and even more probable that the jumper on the drive is misconfigured because, although the user "didn't do anything," that new CD-ROM they installed is on the same controller as the hard drive. The disappointing part of making a hard drive spin back to life exists in the 10-15 percent that are actual physical failures that will require depot level repair to extract any data. A very expensive process.

From: Ron Masters

Hard Drive Dies.
Oh, you've got to love these kinds of situations, don't you?

Well, this may sound strange, but it's worked for me before. (That is, if booting off a floppy still won't gain you access...and there are strange sounds coming from the drive...)

1. Shut down the power and remove the case cover to gain access to the drive. Remove the drive from the case, but leave it connected to power and ribbon cable. (If the ribbon connector cable isn't long enough, attach one that is.)

2. Now, hold the drive in your hands and kick on the power (use an assistant if you'd like). As soon as the power comes on, twist the hard drive quick and fast in your hands. (Kind of like steering a car hard right). This sudden "torqueing" is sometimes enough to "break" a drive free, allowing it to spin...usually for one last time. (Have a Zip or second drive already ready to gain access to the files.)



From: co

· As a last resort, I would consult the Internet.

From: Jim Davison


I would use the following steps even considering that you state the user had "tried" to manually enter the settings in setup and also tried auto. The user may not know what they are doing.

If no then I would go to step 2.



From: ppotts





From:Gary Moon

You have to troubleshoot from the hardware up:
2. Set the drive type back to Auto. If drive ID isn't taking place, then you can't communicate with the drive anyway.
3. If you can't hear the platters spin up or the heads doing their "positioning dance,” and it's a few years old, it might have a "sticktion" problem caused by the lubricant on the platters sticking to the heads. With the PC off, give the hard drive a couple of sharp taps on the side with the handle of a screwdriver! Then power it up again.
4. If all the hardware seems to be functional, you'll have to see if you can get at the data.

From: John Bragdon

I have tried only a couple of steps on my own:

1. If you are a "computer person" you would have brought a bootable floppy with you. Boot off the floppy and hopefully you can read the c: drive then.
2. Opening up the box and slapping the hard drive can revive the hard drive if the servomotor is "frozen."

From: Lou Schweichler

This procedure assumes you do not hear any "grinding noises" or other evidence of a physical damage, i.e. worn-out bearings, dragging read heads, etc. If you do, then the HDD is "toast" and you might as well offer your customer your condolences as the HDD has just headed to the big computer in the sky and it's cheaper these days to replace the HDD then to repair it.


Second, if the first step didn't solve the problem, then the FAT Table may be corrupted. Use a utility like EZ-Drive, which usually can be downloaded from any of the Major HDrive OEM's Web site, to switch to a backup version of the FAT (file allocation table). Usually there is a backup of the FAT on the HDD, but switching to it requires the use of a HDD utility like EZ-Drive. Follow the instructions for the Advance Options to switch FATs, then reboot. If reboot to the C:\ prompt is successful, AND you can access your data files, Run SCANDISK from the DOS prompt to verify the integrity of the FAT. Then do a cursory search of the HDD for any documents you may have recently created. If you can get a good DIR listing of them, you're done—smoke' em if you got em!. If not, then try third step.


From: Brett Edmonson


From: Chris Karo

· If I have another PC that’s the same, I would compare all CMOS settings.

From:Bryan J. Lykins

This solution comes from the "been there, done that—multiple times.”

· If the controller lights come on and the diagnostic program recognizes your drive, but the disk is still not accessible, then most likely it is "frozen" internally. There have been several drives that have had this problem in the past. (Specifically, there were some IBM 2- and 4-GB drives, Maxtor 760 -MB, and Seagate 2 GB).

From: TJR2

Invalid drive specification.

If drive is IDE:

5) Try a different IDE cable.
6) If none of the above steps work, it must be 4th down and time to "punt." If the data is irreplaceable and critical, call Onsite for a quote on data recovery.

If drive is SCSI:

1) Use the controller utilities to see if the card settings are correct.

Unfortunately I am not experienced in SCSI drives and would not be able to apply anything more than what is listed.

From: Gary Gillaspie



(1) Boot computer from a bootable disk, load CD-ROM drivers. Then run ndd's (Norton Disk Doctor) revive option, this will revive the mbr (master boot record) and all the data.

From: Jack Levin

The first thing I do is see if the drive is spinning. Many times the drive just gets stuck and a small tap will get the drive spinning again. If that is the case and the drive does come back after some mechanical agitation, I "Ghost" the drive to a new replacement as fast as I can.



From: Howard Adkins


From: Ted Senn


From: Raymond V.Hall


2. Secure current info and drivers from manufacturers www site.




6. Use setup to confirm accurate drive settings.


8. Thank the user for showing patience.

From: David P. Pedersen

· Second step would be to remove the offending "dead" drive from the computer.

From: John C. Britt Jr.


From: Kampstra Richard Contractor AMC CSS/SAS



From: Brad Gorecki


From: Bob Matott


From: Craig Connelly

6. Don't waste too much time on the issue. Data is only as good as your last backup.
"Save early, Save often.”

From: Pahl Jeff TSgt AFMIA/MISO

For FAT file systems.
1st boot from floppy and try to access C:.
If that doesn't work, run Fdisk /MBR. Sometimes replacing the master boot record will fix a non-booting drive.

From:Matthew Harvey

Had this happen last year. Tried running the drive as a slave in another machine (could be the controller, you know) but that didn't do the trick. So we sent it away to a recovery shop. They charge $100 to look at it, send you a list of all the files they could find and recover, and then they want $1,500 to send you those files on a CD-R. We balked at the charge and said, "No thanks, just send us back our hard drive." They did. Of course, in order to read the disk and list the files for us, they had to make a repair to the drive. When it was returned to us I was able to slave it in another machine and copy all of its contents—just finished before their jury-rigged repair failed on us. Full data recovery for $100—not a bad deal, huh?

From: Spike

· In a Win95 situation, the first thing is to check the BIOS configuration and make sure that the user didn't inadvertently turn off the HDD.
· If this checks out okay, open the PC and check to make sure the cable is secure...or replace it to rule this out.
· Often this will work with Win95.
· If the drive boots (even just to a prompt) run a virus scan. Many viruses hide themselves in the boot record and will actually copy the boot record to a different part of the drive...thus, not allowing the O/S to find it. If no viruses are a scandisk (from the floppy or from Safe Mode) and make sure there isn't too much corruption.
· Corruption or's time to back up your important files and format the drive. This may be all that's needed to restore a drive to a functional state.
· If after the format there are still problems...trash the drive. Don't take any chances with a flaky hard drive.
· If the suspect drive is a Winnt drive...there are not a whole lot of options. Follow the steps above to the point of rebooting the system.
· In the case of NT (if it is not BIOS related), you will generally get a ntoskrnl error and the system will halt. Otherwise...the BSOD is always a possibility.
· In the event that the drive will not boot at all, take the drive to another machine and slave it to an existing hard drive (preferably with NT as you won't see the NTFS partitions otherwise).
· Boot the second machine and see if the drive is visible from explorer...if it is...lucky you!
· Back it up pronto.
· If you cannot see the drive because it has an NTFS partition and the machine you're using is Win95...there is a utility available called NTFSDos.
· If the drive is still dead in the water after all of this...chances are it's going to stay that way but I haven't come across too many drives I couldn't re-animate. :-)

From: Jamey Copeland


Try Sysing the c drive if it is visible from dos.

Check the power connector.

Replace the hard drive...hehe.

From: George Rosser



From: Milciades Marrocchi


Another one I had was a disk that would not start spinning. We fixed it (and don't ask me why) by giving it some hits with the tips of our fingers (while powered on). At one point, it started spinning and we could get out its data.

From: Marco Antonio

I like to use shiramitzu. It´s a powerful software provided (free) by ontrack (, I found it when I had some hd´s with their boot sector erased by Chernobyl virus and this software allowed safe backup of the files in it.

From: Lawrence Taylor-Duncan

1. Look up manufacturer, model number etc. on drive. At same time, check jumper settings on drive correctly set to MASTER. If there's a slave drive check its settings, too.

2. Search for model in the Microhouse Technical Library using your trusty laptop (call yourself a tech? OF COURSE you have a copy of this in your arsenal...).

3. Write down manual settings from Microhouse database (# cylinders, etc.). If you need jumper settings above, they're there too! If no Microhouse Library available, try manufacturer's Web site, (this all assuming this setup data is not stamped on drive).

4. Enter data in CMOS

5. Save and re-boot.

Time to completio–n—10-15 minutes.







From: Curtis Coons

Run Norton's recovery disks. This is done from DOS.

From: Mike Metcalfe

1. The drive data is in BIOS correctly.
2. The data cable is in good condition.
3. The IDE port on the main board is functioning.



A: prompt.





From: Joe Blackledge




From: cpruszko

1. Try the "auto" settings in the BIOS again
2. If that does not work, use a DOS formatted boot disk, boot the system to the a: drive, type "C:" to see if you can access the hard drive. If this works, back up valuable files then re-install Windows.

From: Joe Dougherty

The quiz scenario didn't mention the operating system in use, so I'll assume the user has Windows 95/98 installed on the system.

run a completely NT shop at my company.)



If the hardware still can't detect the operating system, one of two things might be wrong. Either the Master Boot Record on the hard disk is corrupt or damaged, or the system is attempting to boot to a partition that isn't bootable. This is where fdisk helps (no matter what operating system you use).



If that fails, the Master Boot Record on the boot partition may be corrupted. Reboot to the DOS diskette, and at the A: prompt, invoke the fdisk command using the /MBR switch. This won't start fdisk, but it will rewrite the Master Boot Record and may allow you to boot the system back to the hard disk partition. I've done this a number of times on systems running Windows 95/98, Windows NT, Linux, and OS/2.

From: edward.fearon

So your hard drive has failed, eh?

And it’s got that all important invoice/CV/document that you cannot afford to lose...

"It was working last time I used it" and "I never touched it" drift into the conversation.


Well, you may just be able to recover most of the HD, or perhaps even just that one file if you...

1) Take out the hard disk of the System Unit... get your local Techie Guru to do it for you if you aren't happy…
2) And give it gentle twists along its horizontal axis.
3) Plug it in and try again... if it works, go to step 9 ASAP.
4) Switch on the monitor.
7) Cross your fingers.
8) Switch on the power.

And if that fails...


Or call a professional Hard Drive Recovery Service!!!

From: Dan Calloway



(2) If you can read drive C, backup the contents of the disk and then either reformat the disk and reload the data. If you can't read see drive C, then start Fdisk or some other MBR reader to see if the system acknowledges the existence of the hard drive.

(3) If the drive isn't recognized, then check for loose connections and check the drive's configuration in CMOS. Is the drive too hot or cold? Is it spinning at all? Remove and reseat the controller. A controller swap might possibly make the drive respond where it wouldn't before.


(5) If the partitions don't exist on the MBR, then the response is to rebuild or restore the data to the disk. You may have to rebuild the MBR from a previously backed up copy of it or, if you haven't backed up the MBR, steal an identical MBR from another PC by backing up the MBR from a working machine onto a floppy diskette and restore the MBR of the troubled PC.




From: Frank Luna



From: C.K. Smith

This is not an easy one to answer. All of it can depend on the problem at hand (what type of hard drive) and the error messages received. Sometimes, certain brands of hard drives (such as Compaq and CTX) have no "raising the dead". If there is no internal clock, and the hard drive doesn't realize it is there ... well ... except for replacing the CMOS chip, say "ADIOS"!

From: Steven Troester

A lot of time a drive failure is not the physical drive, but the drive's circuit board. I've successfully revived dead drives by finding (sometimes purchasing) an identical drive and carefully swapping the circuit boards.

From: marian1

The situation you suggest best describes inability of BIOS to determine the type of your primary hard drive. Its parameters can be determined from the h/d manufacturer's sticker and entered manually in SETUP under USER or MANUAL entry, depending on your BIOS. The parameters can also be downloaded from Technical Support site of the manufacturer as pdf file and read using Acrobat.

From: Jim Augherton


From: Tim Payne

Sometimes you need to run a check on a disk but you can't get it to load NT to run it. For example, you get an inaccessible boot device. One way to run the check is as follows:

· Take a set of Windows NT Setup Boot floppies and begin a new install.
· If you don't have a set of boot floppies, you can make a set from the Windows NT CD. Run Winnt32/ox from the i386 directory.
· Do not upgrade but choose 'N' for a new install. When prompted for a directory name, choose WINNT2 by simply adding a '2' to the suggested location, which is the current location of your crashed NT. Choose
· "Leave the Current File System intact" when given the partition choices.

By installing to the same partition you will be given the chance to do a complete scan. Do the thorough scan and when it's complete, you will see a message that indicates that changes were made and to press 'F8' to restart your computer and begin the setup.



2. Execute Dskprobe.exe from the NT4 resource kit.

3. From the Drives menu, select Logical Volume.

4. From within the 'Open Logical Volume' window, double click on the drive letter of the corrupted volume.

5. Remove the check from 'Read Only' check box and select the 'Set Active' button. This establishes a handle to this volume.


6. Select 'Read' from the 'Sectors' menu.

7. In the 'Read Sectors' window, if 'Starting Sectors' does not already read "0", type in the number "0" and select the 'Read' button.

8. Select 'NTFS BootSector' from the View menu.

9. From within the NTFS information window, select the 'Go' button next to 'Clusters to MFT' field. The Sector "X" for 1 that is displayed in the Title Bar is the cluster number that begins the MFT, WRITE THAT "X" NUMBER DOWN.

10. Once again repeat 6 and 7 to return to the BootSector 11. Next, from within the NTFS information window, select the 'Go' button next to 'Clusters to MFT Mirr' field.


11. Select 'Read' from the Sectors menu.

12. In the Read Sectors window, type "8" in the Number of Sectors field and select the 'Read' button. (We are gathering the sectors to write into the original MFT location.) What we're trying to get is 4 1024-byte MFT records, and that means 8 512-byte sectors.

13. Select 'Write' from the Sectors menu.

14. Type in the "X" number that you WROTE DOWN above into the starting sector to write data field and select the Write It button, reply to the message: Are you sure you want to permanently overwrite the data in... with the Yes button.

15. Quit Disk Probe.


17. Right click and select 'Assign Drive Letter.’




From: Thomas W Lawrence

· First replace the IDE cable to your hard drive
· If that don't work, second, you could make this drive a slave install a new hard drive and try copying the drive to the new drive or…
· I have done this several times and it worked.

From: rob.hardman






From: David Forster

· Sometimes, the clue gives a starting point.
· Then boot to the A drive with fdisk on it, run "fdisk /mbr to reset the "master boot record" onto the drive. If the drive was set up with EZ or Ontrack, then possibly their utility could be used to bring back the drive.

From: tal


From: Sami.Hanninen

Hello, here's my suggestion:

1. Diagnose if the fault is in the drive or in the machine by plugging the drive to another computer (preferably identical). If you don't have one, go to a computer store and ask them to try it out.
4. If the partitions do not exist anymore, at least not visibly to the computer and nothing else helps, it's best to send your drive to a company that restores your data—if it's important enough. Because this kind of restoring costs a lot.

From: Anirudh Singhania


From: Adil M. Niazy [adil_niazy

If the PC can't detect the hard disk type from the setup, then we definitely have a hardware problem. Any of the following may solve the problem.

From: James Fylan

Whenever I've come across a drive that's got that funky dying tick-tick rhythm on power up, I call upon the ancient and mystical powers of gumbyism and smack it repeatedly about the upper housing with a blunt object. It may be dumb but if the drive is caught early enough, the 'gumby mallet of might' will often give you enough time to whip that data off....

From:Meng Ling Lee

I will try the following:

1. Disconnect disk drive and reconnect again.
4. Access Setup and run 'Auto Detect' to detect the disk drive type.
5. Listen to the disk drive when it is booting.
6. Notice the disk drive LED when it is booting.
7. Boot from floppy disk and run 'FDISK' to display the disk drive capacity.
8. Make sure the disk drive is the primary and set "Active.”

From: Walt Lonnborg




Check the jumpers on all drives for master/slave settings.



If it autodetects the drive, try a reboot. If you can read the drive backup everything you can. You can backup files from a DOS prompt. You don't have to get Windows running to backup essential data.

If the reboot doesn't work: Set the CMOS to boot from an appropriate operating system diskette A: or CD and reboot.

If you can read the drive backup everything you can. Use fdisk /mbr to rebuild the boot record. Try to reboot. If reboot still doesn't work, reinstall the operating system.

From:Ian Steele




From: Eric Springler

These are some of the things that I would do...

d) If it's just a case of the disk not being bootable, do and FDISK /MBR to the drive, or do a SYS C: off of a different Win98/95 boot disk. If it's NT, do a repair of boot/system files. It asks for a repair disk, but you can use any old repair disc for that.
e) Stick the drive in another Win9X box (if it was a fat16/32 drive) and run norton disk doctor (tm) on it. Sometimes Norton will recover enough of the directory listings for you to retrieve some of the data

That's about all that I can think of right now.

From: Gary Stevens

Welcome to the wonderful of crashed computers.


1. Ascertain what the user was doing before it stopped.
2. Ask what they did to try and fix it.
8. Rebuild the system based on diagnosis.


From: Jerry Pacheco

· Check to see if the drive spins up; if not, replace drive.
· If drive spins up, check cmos settings.
· If cmos settings are okay, check fdisk to see if partition is still accessible.
· If fdisk shows partition, check to see if you can access drive from prompt.
· If you can access drive, run to make drive bootable. Reboot from drive.
· If you can't access drive, run scandisk or norton utilities from floppy.
· If scandisk or norton fixes problem, reboot from drive.
· If scandisk or norton doesn't find errors, re-partition and reformat drive.
· If you encounter errors while formatting the drive, replace drive.







From: Doug Carpenter

2. Make sure a disk manager isn't installed on the drive. If that's at least a possibility (greater than 2.1GB on old 486 computer?), try using the usual drive parameters for a disk manager: 1024, 16, 63
5. Can you hear the drive spinning up? Can you see a hard drive access LED visibly working? Maybe it's spinning up slowly, press pause or reset to allow time for the hard drive to get up to speed, see if the problem disappears.

From: Letehumy Rajavalu, GSSB

Reboot the PC, get to the CMOS setup and set the drive type to "auto" again to confirm if the hard disk is detected.


From: Brent Hunter

Very simple, I think?!

While the drive is running, you should be able to get all the information off the drive, unless it has "bad sectors, etc."

My usual task list involves using "GHOST" to get the data of the hard drive. But sometimes this doesn't work, because of bad sectors, or the drive timing out while trying to sort itself out. My next solution is to use XCOPY32 under a Windows 98 dos prompt. This enables you to use more and interesting switches. Ninety-nine percent of the time, this gets the data off a failing drive.

My syntax is a follows:

Posts: 157
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2002 6:01 am
Location: Tønsberg,Norway

and at last....

Postby Colje » Tue Nov 04, 2003 8:50 pm

From: Skip Berryhill

You didn't say, but often, when a hard drive won't boot, you can boot on a floppy disc with FDISK on it, log onto the hard drive, and execute some commands (DIR, COPY, and the like).



The /MBR switch was undocumented for a long time.

From: Phil Adams

· After running scandisk, you should be able to xcopy everything to the new drive.

From: Robert P Mulhearn, Jr

Use Steve Gibson's spinrite on a quarterly basis to keep track of HD condition and recover bad drives as long as they are recognized by OS.

From: Kevin Flateau

First of all, is the drive alive?
When you turn on the machine shortly after a quick ticking noise (watch the memory count on the screen), then you'll hear the floppy do a quick click and the light on the front will go on, then you'll hear some short clicking from the hard drive and its name will appear on the screen. If you don't hear anything and the period after the floppy and before the notification of hard disk failure is more than 20-30 seconds, then your drive has most likely run out of gas. If it did make a noise (hum type) odds are the drive is still alive so let's try to wake it up.

3. Hit escape, F10, and answer "Y" to the “Save?” question.

From: Shadow

You get a call from a user at work, a consulting client, or a neighbor who's found out you're "a computer person." (Sometimes they all call on the same day, don't they?)

Maybe you're lucky. When you get there, the machine boots just fine. The user says, "That computer doesn't like me." You tell the user to back up important files while the system is running because you're going to order a new hard drive so this doesn't happen again.

But then there are the times you aren't lucky. You get messages like "disk 0 error" and "invalid drive specification." I recently got those errors trying to revive the hard drive of a Compaq Prolinea 4/66.

It doesn't matter what the box is, though.

The circumstances are all too familiar:
The data isn't backed up.
The problem came out of nowhere.
There was no startup disk made by this machine.





If this also fails, then once again the hammer comes into play...this time to allow the user to beat the crap out of the old drive and relieve the frustration of having lost everything because they thought "backups are for sissies."

From: Carla Maslakowski


From: Todd Layland

Pull the jumper on the motherboard that will reset the settings (bios, password, etc.) of the system. If it boots, you know it was a config setting that screwed up. If it doesn't, well HD are cheap.

From: Dale

First things...first:
· I would manually enter this data if auto detect could not figure it out.

From: Ken Beckett


From: NetMarkC

I've lost my "C: drive before and was able to get it back by removing and reinstalling the CMOS battery.

From: dmo


From: David Knapp

Oops, didn't read the question close enough. In order to revive a hard drive that won't boot, I do the following.
· Boot to floppy that has the basics on it—fdisk, edit, sys, format, Fdisk to see if the drive is being recognized by the system.
· If you can't access it from dos, I would basically give up, but you can try to sys it too. Depends on the problem.

From: DKauschjr

· I would first go into the bios and attempt to redetect the hard drive.

From: David Knapp


From: LByer1

Reboot the machine hitting delete key entering into the cmos setup.


From: Chris Draper

When you support any number of users, hard drive failures are an unfortunate fact of life. I have had users cry in front of me when I have had to tell them that all of their data has gone to "data heaven.” Recovering data from corrupt or failed drives is more of an art that a science.
· I have even been able to get some drives to spin up by "gently" tapping on them with a screwdriver while they were powered up.
· Please keep in mind that this is a last resort technique.

From: Avraham Schkloven


If the disk is spinning at startup:

Be aware that many older viruses effect the boot sector and fats of hard drives and give errors "invalid drive specification." a good DOS antivirus should be used.




Unfortunately, some patients do not survive.

From: KrisMHorn



Usually, if these don't work, your drive can be sent to a data recovery center (if the data is just so critical that they can't live without it.) Usually, this costs hundreds of dollars.... And you would still have to replace the hard drive in order to obtain the data back from the recovery center.

From: Denford L. Owens


From: David Crocker

· If you can, I then do a to c: and reboot.
· I would use Norton’s Disk Doctor first, then would try using Spindoctor.
· As we all know sometimes all your best efforts are in vain.
Good luck with your test drive.

From: FS296


From: Norton Seron

2. Remove HDD and read label regarding "jumper" position for master (without slave) if necessary.
3. Check power cable plugged into HDD properly.
5. Reboot PC and verify that problem is still present.
6. Replace HDD data cable.
8. See 5.
10. See 5.
11. Check CMOS chip is plugged in firmly.
12. If any of the above result in function, then boot onto system floppy and "fdisk/mbr" to fix master boot record and then fdisk to check partition, followed by DOS scandisk and surface scan to check for bad sectors on HDD. If bad sectors are found, then back up needed data and replace and reinstall HDD and OS and APPS.

From: Gilbert Betancourt






From: Dave Rutherford

You need to first figure what is not (or is) happening. If the drives are just not spinning, you might be in luck. Otherwise, you had better be carrying the 'toolkit' (mostly software these days).


Nothing loose, then pull and reseat everything—esp. the memory. Watch it, make sure you are grounded... you left the system plugged in right? No plug, no ground.

Still nothing? Here’s one Seagate tech support told me in the early 80's… it still works like a charm. Pull the hard disk from the chassis and plug the power and data back in. Then holding the drive in the left, with the CABLE end towards you, BUMP IT with the HEEL of your right hand. ONCE medium hard (this will unseat magnetics, release brake mechanisms, and even pull heads stuck in soft platter coatings.... I've looked).



Finally, do you have another drive same model? You can swap logic boards...just don’t leave it that way. The read/write electronics are balanced to the heads inside the drive. This MAY work if you have a bad motor chip, etc.


IF IT’S NOT A SPIN PROBLEM, use a drive id software (many available) to check how the drive SAYS it’s set... even though the bios does not get this report does not mean the drive is dead to this question...! No answer, you can use some software (like Disk Mangler–—commercial) to rewrite track 0. THIS IS dangerous, so know what you are doing. I practiced on bad drives that I had first.

Other things not quite right, swap the PLACEMENT of RAM in the system... surprised? Shouldn’t be. Ram is used for just about anything, right from the start. Check the POWER. Use a good meter.

From: David C. Projansky

4. On the other hand, I've had disk drive fail because of bad cables (a good indication of this is if the BIOS can't detect the hard drive), power supply problems, and bad power cables.


From: Steve Schoenecker


· I'd boot from a clean floppy (watch closely for indication of an overlay program which might say "to boot from a floppy, hold the spacebar down." This can really eat your lunch!) and then run a dos-based virus scanner such as FPROT or something like that just to be sure.
· Look inside and see if the drive configuration specs are on the drive or look them up... make sure power is connected securely data cable etc. Make sure drive is spinning up, verify cmos settings for HD type, and boot order, etc. Visually verify which devices are on which IDE channel etc.
· If I fix the cmos settings, then the system boots okay but not after being turned off...suspect cmos is probably okay–good idea to backup important stuff at this point anyway!
· If I cant get to c: drive, I'd probably run fdisk and look at the drive information to see if it thinks that the drive had partitions defined, how many, what size etc. I've seen the fdisk table scrambled mess because of a virus... I have fixed this problem a couple of times... OS2 fdisk utility can help here sometimes... (more of a last resort) best to get important data (if I get it running) and then start over with fdisk/format/reinstall....
· If another drive works but not this one, and I still cant access the drive at all....punt.
· If critical, consider sending to a data recovery specialist.
If drive is detected but won’t boot:
· If I can access the stuff on the drive, I'd back up. If drive is accessible but won’t boot, I'd check the version of OS then sys the c: drive with an appropriate boot disk. If this doesn't work, maybe fdisk /mbr will help.
· If the OS dies while loading drivers etc.. look there...

Hope I haven't forgotten anything obvious... each one is different and I usually win! I have a couple of dead drives in a box... I'd love to hear some new tricks to try on them!


Order a new identical drive and swap the controllers.

From: hotmail

Unfortunate the box does matter!
1) Open the box and check for HD's model; go to manufacturer’s Web page; find out the details (Heads, Cylinders, sectors per track) and use those at setup, configuring manually the HD's params; download specific software (EZdrive, etc.) for the HD's model.
2) Check for OS the user is running.
3) If OS is MS-based (excluding NT), then get a boot disk under Win95b/98; start the machine and use the program you've downloaded or if the HD is old, try to use NDD (only if OS is MSDOS or Win95 do not try to use it if there is a possibility to have VFAT32 installed).
4) Usually most of us do carry with them some startup diskettes with an antivirus, so USE IT FOR BOOT (I myself use an emergency Boot Disk made with the help of McAfee AntiVirus since it's very usual to run up to a virus).
5) If all the above are pretty hard to do, then try to install the new HD, and OS; connect the old HD as a secondary master (or primary slave if that's easier) and start the computer booting from new HD and try to access the old one.
6) If the old one is inaccessible then be sure that the drive was installed through BIOS without using any overlay driver to expand BIOS's addressable HD capacity; If there was, try to get from Web the latest update of that driver and install it temporarily (Use a boot diskette rather then installing at Primary Master's Boot Sector) and boot from that diskette.
7) Hopefully you've been able to access HD. If not there may be some tools in the manufacturer's soft you've downloaded; otherwise ... try to stay calm!!! and proceed with some Web searching. There are some good tools to access the partition and try to fix it manually (If you Dare) using a disk editor to repair boot partition. Well it 's much more complicated sometimes but you may try it at your own risk. Or you may just say " Hmmmm..... Told you so... Sorry there is no way out... you should keep backups!" (an easy solution :->)

From: Doug Wood


From: Bill Chomik

What I do in this situation is as follows.

· I always have a spare hard drive with me. I hook this drive up to the computer in question making it the primary drive. The drive that doesn't work, I change the jumper to become a secondary master and attach it to the same ribbon in the computer.
· If the above doesn't work where the bad drive cannot be accessed, any and all loses are accounted for. The old drive is thrown away and replaced with a new drive. The person who doesn't take the responsibility for backing up his data has to learn to live with the consequences of these actions. A lot of times, I'm the one that ends up getting blamed, but you learn to take this with a grain of salt and brush it off.

From: Billy Dunn

The first thing I do is boot on a boot disk and fdisk/mbr if the computer can see the hard drive but can't boot after you sys C:.

From: Ben Hardman

Lets see...
· First, I would see if I could see the disk in the BIOS.
· I would first get another drive preferably the exact same model drive.
· It may not be able to recover all files but this sometimes works. If that still did not work to recover the data portion of the drive...
· But I digress, back to the controller... After switching controllers see if the drive is visible and the data is in tact. If that does not work verify the drive is spinning up.
· I have even gone as far as taking a bad drive whose drive head was bad and removed the platters and put them in a new drive's platters place.

From: Zlito

· I always try to reset the defaults in the setup first.

From: Sasha Baer

After much searching, I found a helpful article ( ... 3/9/73.asp) on the MS site describing how to repair the boot sector.

From:Jim Claypool
Start with the basics:

· Reseat the IDE cable at all connection points, checking for bent pins.
· Clear the BIOS settings.

If the above three did not bring it back:
· I'd look at next trying a different IDE cable.
· If that didn't help, try slaving the drive to another hard disk.

New master did autotype but still can't see the old drive? During power up, use the fat end of a screwdriver to gently tap the outside of the suspect hard disk. Sometimes the arm gets stuck and a gentle tap will free it.

From: Salvatore Valela

I saw this problem once before. The monkey b virus will take a piece of your boot sector and move it at an unspecified location on the hard drive. I would run a virus checker software program to see if you have a virus.

From: Kim Chappell

I came across a situation where the computer would not boot from the hard drive. The drive was making a horrible whining noise, and I was getting messages like "invalid media" or something similar. The user had all of her e-mail stored in a PST file on the hard drive and had never backed it up.
She was frantic. This is what I did:
· I made the original drive a slave and then booted up with the new drive.
· I then had no problem seeing the files on the old drive.

From: mhicks

A common problem with older hard disk drives in particular, such as those found in '486 class machines, is termed ”stiction,” a condition in which the lubricants that the manufacturer coated the drive platter surfaces with have gummed up, eventually causing the drive spindle motor to no longer be able to spin up the drive at power-up time. The problem may manifest itself intermittently at first, allowing the user to get started today, by switching the computer's power off and on again. But finally the day comes when no amount of power switch jiggling will help.

· Hold the drive in your hand, still connected, and turn on the computer's power switch.
· The object here is to impart some force to the spindle platter, as a sort of mechanical ”jump-start,” so that the force of your manual motion, added to the drive motor's normal start-up torque, will be sufficient to overcome the extra dragging stiction of the gummy lubricants, allowing the spindle to start up.

If this fails the first time, try again.

From: Arve Alsvik


Anyway: This is my only suggestion.

From: John_A_Cook


From: TorA.Rysstad

The most important thing to do in this situation is to protect the data on the drive. And in my experience; the more one try to "look" for data on the disk, the more it might get destroyed.

Try to listen to the hard drive. Are there any weird sounds emitting from it? I have two "sound categories.” The first is identified by sort of "buzzing" sound or perhaps a loud "ploink" sound. The second category: no sound at all, or the drive seems to running at full speed, even if the PC is "frozen.” The first might indicate a physical damage. That might be hard to solve, but that does not imply that everything is lost. I often find almost everything on the disk like this:

· Take the damaged hard drive out of the client’s PC.

· Take particular care not to bump the drive. There is a chance that the heads are not parked properly. You don't need more damage to the disk than there already are!

· Put the damaged disk in another PC.

Usually with modern disks you can auto-sense the needed specs (Heads, Cylinders, etc.), but sometimes you'll need to type this manually. And of some reason the hard drive manufactures has not considered it important enough to print this information on the label. This has puzzled me more than one time... But you can find all you need on the Internet. The Compaq that was mentioned was (I think) originally equipped with a Seagate disk. Their disk Support can be found on

Remember that you will probably have to change the jumper setting. MAKE SURE THE DAMAGED DISK IS SET TO BE SLAVE!!

Copy the needed files from the damaged disk

Try to copy the files you need from the damaged disk. DO NOT try to run Scandisk or Norton Disk Doctor etc!! These programs might make things worse! Do every thing to get the files you need first! Afterwards you might consider attempts to revive the disk. Then Scandisk will be very helpful.
But remember, if the disk has crashed once, then you should not trust the disk.

If you cannot find anything on the disk, then I have found that Norton Utilities is amazingly effective. But there are alternatives available at

Revive is a simple small program. Try it! I've tried it a couple of times, and it really works!! BTW: The Prolinea should not be thrown away just yet! If there is a network card in it, then it can be used as a intranet server. Install Linux and Apache Web server on it, maybe even FrontPage extensions, and voila, you'll have a splendid intranet server, or a test bench for testing Web-ideas! Just remember that:

· A computer this old might not be able to support very large disks (> 1.2 GB)
· Update the BIOS. The Prolinea has Flashable BIOS. So updating the BIOS is very simple. Take a look here: ... 10_22.html
Install Linux without graphical interface. The 486 processor will not offer the power needed to run KDE or GNOME in a satisfying way. You will also save allot of disk space. If you can find a old 540Mb disk then that can be more than enough!

If you install NT 3.51 Server, then this computer might be used as a separate printer server. It should be able to serve approx. 30-40 people without any trouble. But you should have 32_MB RAM and approx. 500-MB free space if the users are printing large files, like PowerPoint presentations, etc.
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Postby thanuk » Wed Nov 05, 2003 3:22 pm

Wow that's awesome colje, thanks so much.
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Postby Sarvis » Wed Nov 05, 2003 5:32 pm

Pretty cool... haven't read them all yet but the freezing ones seem logical. sorta.

They got anything for first generation PS2's?
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Postby Colje » Wed Nov 05, 2003 10:26 pm

whats wrong with your ps2??
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Postby Sarvis » Thu Nov 06, 2003 12:49 am

It fails to read disks with varying frequency. Sometimes Tekken 4 will work first try, sometimes we have to reset the system 10 times for it to work. This is true for pretty much every game I own or have rented. SSX Tricky worked fine for a few weeks, now we can't get it to load. GTA4 stopped loading just after I'd gotten my own mansion. Contra: Shattered Soldier I only got to load succesfully once when I rented it, and damn that was a good game that I only got to play for a couple hours. :(

It's pretty damn frustrating, and from what I understand it is because they used some sub-par parts in the first generation machines to save money. The laser basically burns out after about a year. I've owned mine for 3, and it started having problems last year...

Supposedly you could pretty easily talk Sony into replacing it, but I never got around to calling and figure now it may have just been too long.

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Postby Sarell » Thu Nov 06, 2003 10:40 am

what I did is buy a coldroom and assemble it in the backyard with a large generator to run, then put your TV and ps2 in there and play it! :)
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Postby Yadir » Sat Nov 08, 2003 6:30 am


This might address your PS2 problem.. if you have the guts to try it. :) ... ps2-1.html


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