harddriverecoverybasics.com

Hard Drive Recovery Tip 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.

If the data is good, send the new HDA and bad board back to be fixed, put the good drive (with original data) back in, reboot, and away you go.

Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Jack Ho

• First of all, get yourself a Win95/98 startup disk and an emergency boot disk from your favorite virus-scanning software and disk-repairing programs.
• Second, note the number of drives in the system and reboot the machine. When it boots up, make sure you can hear the all drives spin up. If the spinning sounds are confusing, you may have to open up the case.
• If any of the drives didn't spin, turn off the PC and take the computer case off. Carefully unplug the drive cables and power cables and reconnect them. Then power up the system. If the drives still do not spin, swap the power cables and try again. If they still do not spin, then you know for sure those drives are dead. To retrieve data from these drives, you may have to take them to a nearby data recovery center and be prepared to spend some bucks. If they spin after you swap the cables, then you've got power problems, and you need to replace the power supply on the system.
• If the drive is spinning but the system does not recognize it, such as "invalid drive specification" or "disk 0" errors, cold boot the machine and enter CMOS setup. Make sure the disk controller (whether it is IDE or SCSI) is enabled. Set it to AutoDetect if it is an IDE drive. Set the correct SCSI options (by entering the appropriate SCSI utility) if it is a SCSI drive. Since the system was working before, I assume the SCSI IDs and master/slave parameters are correct. After the correct options are set, reboot the system. For an IDE drive, if the system still does not recognize it, manually enter the drive parameters in the CMOS set up and reboot again. If the system has a CD-ROM drive, note if it was being recognized by the system. If the system does not recognize both hard drives and CD-ROM drives, take the computer case off and replace the IDE cables (or SCSI cables if they are SCSI drives). Note any broken pins when you replace the cables. If there are any broken pins, you may have to replace the drives or motherboard.
• After you've replaced the cables, if the drives are still not being recognized, the drives may be bad. If you have a spare working drive, plug it in. If it works, then you know the other drives are bad: either a severe virus has contaminated the drives such that the drive parameters are overwritten, or there are physical errors with the drives. If the system does not even recognize your spare working drive, then the disk controller is bad and needs to be replaced.
• If the system recognizes the drive but does not boot up your OS, cold boot your system from a bootable virus ERD and do a complete scan of the failed drive. Repair any corrupted master boot records if possible. If the virus-scanning disk does not find any virus, cold boot the system with a bootable ERD from your favorite disk repairing software such as Norton Disk Doctor. If this still does not help, but you are able to access the data from a floppy boot disk, you can recover the system by backing up all your data and reinstalling the OS on the hard drive. If the failed drive can't be accessed from a boot floppy and is not repairable by any "disk doctor" programs, take it to a data recovery center.