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Hard Drive Recovery Tip 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 size (some older BIOS's required a third party software patch; drives that were 500 MB and larger for instance...). If Auto Detect does not work or if the BIOS/CMOS setup does not have an Auto Detect feature, then I would do as follows:

1. Verify that the drive is spinning up and that all the cables are hooked up properly.
2. I would then verify that the drive itself is configured/jumpered correctly (master/slave/single drive). Most of your current IDE/EIDE drives have the jumper setting on the drive itself, which makes it nice. Though some of the older ones do not, which forces you to call their tech support or search their Web site for jumper configuration.
3. If I had access to another computer, I would either try swapping out the cable to see if I had a bad cable or I would just simply install the "bad" drive into the other computer and see if the BIOS/CMOS detects the drive. If it does not, then chances are very good that the drive is kaput. However, if the other computer does see the drive and I am able to boot up with it, then I have to assume that there's a problem with the other computer's IDE/EIDE controller. One last attempt would be to find the geometry of the drive (cylinders, heads, sectors) and add them in manually. If it booted fine with the other computer, the geometry can be copied from there. Otherwise, a call to the vendor or a search on their Web site would be order. If the hard drive controller is found to be bad, depending on the motherboard (going with the assumption that it has an onboard controller with both a primary and secondary controller), I would check the CMOS to make sure that the IDE controller(s) were enabled. Sometimes you can boot from the secondary IDE/EIDE controller, so I would try that too. If it boots, great! Time for a new motherboard or perhaps just purchase a new controller and disabling the onboard controller. But I would seriously consider getting a new motherboard when budget allows.
4. If I only had the one computer, then I would have to search for a known good hard drive (and cable) that the BIOS supports. Then if it too does not boot, then I would have to guess it's something with the controller/motherboard. If it does boot, then I would have lean towards a bad drive.
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:

Example: 1138 cylinders, 8 heads, 63 sectors–s this would translate to 569 cylinders, 16 heads and 63 sectors.

I would try this trick as perhaps my last resort. But this was used/done on 386/486 machines back in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

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.

Some other things to consider include that a bad power supply can also cause a hard drive not to boot (not allowing it to spin up to full RPM), the amperage required to spin the motor is more than what the motherboard draws/needs even if it has a full bus. Also, I've even seen some ISA, PCI, and AGP cards cause conflicts with onboard IDE/EIDE controllers (usually in the form of IRQ and/or memory address). Though these are usually funky-specialized boards, I have seen it happen.

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.