Hard drive hook-ups

[roto204]

Mounting issues

I've had to deal with XP and Server 2003 machines that had to be told to mount the disk and assign it a drive letter via Disk Management before they would talk to USB-connected drives, but not ones connected into the existing cables on the motherboard, unless--as you noted--they used old non-SATA cabling that needed jumpering.  Usually, if I had the drives mis-jumpered (two slaves, or two masters) the machine wouldn't boot the OS until the situation was remedied.

 

My suspicion would be that the drive motor spins, but it's unable to mount the disk due to problems.  The severity depends on the issue.  Some drive recovery software can work with an unmountable disk and recover files; sometimes well, sometimes in a big, directoryless/folderless garbage heap.  Some even need help determining what the file is, and you're left having to guess at whether you're working with a .doc, .jpg, or other type of file.

 

If the heads contacted the platter during the failure, the chances for even professional recovery are slim.  Physical damage to the disk media can cause trouble for recovery services, which essentially take the good platters from the dead disk and attempt to read them with functioning equipment.

 

[nurdlinger]

I agree with what Nate said

I thought about mentioning the Disk Management applet, but forgot to include it when I was composing my reply.

 

[kb0nes]

I had one Hitachi drive a while back where the electronic controller board appeared to have died on it. I was fortunate enough to have an identical drive and I was able to swap the PC board off the one good drive onto the failed one and recover about 95% of my data.

I had one other drive failure that I had a friend mount in a Linux environment and he was able to recover the lions share of the data from the drive. The drive wouldn't mount in a Windows environment.

A while back I bought one of the hard drive drive adapters that plugs into a USB port. It is one of the handiest tools I have ever bought, it seems to work pretty seamlessly no matter what the computer is. It is especially handy for laptops since then you don't usually have the luxury of the additional parallel/SATA port.

 

[retro-man]

Have been working on a laptop for awhile myself trying to get it to run. I did a cloning for the hard drive with another laptop. Because it still not coming up, I took the hard drive out and put it into another laptop and the hard drive is working fine. Don't know if you have this option of having another laying around. My problem I think is in the memory sticks which I have another set of laying around somewhere. Now the project is trying to find them.

Jon