Problem with the HDD

[nihil]

Hi,

IT IS UNDETECTABLE AND UNREADABLE. I tried loads of recovery softwares, too many to remember. And all of them refused to detect the drive.

You seem to have two problems now?

1. Your system is not detecting the HDD at all, so as far as ANY recovery software goes, the drive does not exist. Also remember that most recovery applications are aimed at Windows, so they will only work with the FAT and NTFS formats. However, they should give you some sort of "unsupported" or "unrecognised" format message, rather than no drive detected.

What to do?

Boot into the BIOS setup, and down the bottom of the first screen there should be an option to detect all HDDs.......................try that.

2. Your drive, and I guess both of them? have somehow been flagged s having a non-Windows compatible format. I am assuming your father's drive is also affected, as you mention 40GB of data and your drive is only 40GB nominal capacity?

But just as when it was all going to get over, the pc hanged. I resetted the system, and ever since then the hard disk is UNDETECTABLE BY THE BIOS.

Not a good idea, rebooting in the middle of something never is IMO........ you only do it as a last resort. The first thing you should try is Task Manager, and try to stop the application/process, which might also take several minutes.

If they are going to be effective, recovery applications will tend to take a long time, particularly with a large and fragmented drive. You must be patient as there is no way you can make them run any faster, and a myriad of opportunities to totally screw your system!

All I can suggest is that:

1. You get the BIOS to recognise the HDD.

My method is to remove the problem drive, mount it in a USB drive caddy (they are very cheap, but make sure that you get one with its own power supply and that supports larger formats, preferably up to 320 GB but at least 160GB) and attach it to a working computer.

My machines boot either Award or AMI BIOS, and they recognise it as an external USB memory device, so you can work on it.

You might try slaving it to a machine with a working HDD, but the BIOS will try to recognise it as another regular HDD and it might not work. I have found the USB caddy more reliable as the BIOS doesn't seem to look at what is mounted in it.

2. Use roadkil's unstoppable copier from a bootable CD/DVD, floppy, or USB stick drive. It doesn't care what format the HDD is or isn't in, or what OS is involved. You can also install it on the HDD of a recovery machine, if you are following that route.

It does take a VERY LONG TIME so you must be patient and let it do its own thing, even if that takes 24, 36, or 48 hours! If you had used it in the first place, as I suggested, you probably would not have your current problems as it makes no alterations to the original drive it is recovering from.

Just do not try to make it go faster..........you can't ; and don't assume it has stalled or frozen................it hasn't. It will even recover files from damaged drives (so long as they spin) which most of the other tools won't.

Good luck! and be patient, this is not a 5 minute job!