My hard drive is gone

I have three computers in my room and normally I just leave one on. The other night I left two of them on. The problem is with the second one which I don't normally leave on. Both are the same computers, IBM netvista running redhat 9.0. The dead one has less RAM though. Anyways, after I left it on overnight, the next day after school I turned the monitor on the computer had frozen. So I turned it off then on again and got the error that the hard disk was not installed. I tried to run fdisk from a win98 boot disk, but that didn't work because to the computer, there is no disk. I also tried the redhat rescue option. But again there was no disk there. I'm guessing that I am going to have to get some sort of boot floppy with the hard drive drivers on it. How do I reinstall my hard disk to get my computer to know it's there?

p.s. Could this have been a hack. I had a bunch of unneccesary services running like, ssh, telnet, sendmail, pop3 and a few more.

thanks for any advice!

is there a disk in BIOS?

for me it sounds like - dead.

at startup it gives me an error then the bios says hdd0 not installed.
I guess It could be dead but I hope not.
I would like a second opinion.
thanks

last chance:

the power supply for the hd is not working correctly.

the drive does not start up ...may be 12V= is dead
~starts up but then can't be found... may be 5V= is dead or less.

if you have a voltmeter ,you may check it.
if not, put the hd into another pc.

second opinion.. advice..

plug it in outside of the box.. so you can hear it.. does it start up ?
I see many hard drives fail due to their interface boards.. failure to detect at bios startup is the most common fault that you'd see if the circuit baord was at fault. you know there are actually inline fuses on many hd interface cards.. so always check those.. they'll be near the input pwr connector.

and I've been lucky in a lot of cases where finding an identical drive and swapping boards have allowed me to get folks data back.

Thanks for the replies. I will try it in another comp tomorrow. I don't have time tonight plus I'm tired.
I'll let you all know what happens. It's probably just dead. (knock on wood)
Thanks again

for a third opinion..

the HDD is most likley DEAD..

But.. being running for several hours AND the system Frozen when you returned.. it seem that the IDE cable may have been loose.. and worked it self into a disconnected condition..

Reseat the IDE cables and restart the comp.... but more likley.. the interface pcb has died.. got another HDD same brand / model you can steal a PCB from?

Cheers

Is the HD set in your CMOS? Does the CMOS hold its configurations? Check ribbon cables for connectivity or swap out cables. Is it IDE or scsi? Do you have onboard controllers or cards? If cards pull and reset card? When you turn on your computer does the fan from your power supply come on or is it dead? You can also pull the HD and put it into your other computer to see if it will boot up....

Good luck,
SQ.......

From the Get-go:
Open the case and check if the HDD is acctualy there!! (it would kinda suck if it wasnt)

if it is, take it out, boot the system, it should beep at you with a simiral error. (if it gives a different error, the HDD might be half-alive)

Plug the HDD in, out of case, check if it runs, you should hear it, it might also have a tiny LED on the bottom of it, encapsulated in glue. If it dosn't work, it's almost safe to say your HDD is fried, but keep going, theres more.

Find a temp-replacement, the other machine will do since their identical machines, see if that one works. If this dosn't work on the machine, but does on the other (live) one, then your Mobo/CPU might also be fried.

I know alot of this might have been mentioned, but here it is in a step-by-step-kinda way.

- Noia

Well, I listened and it seems to be running, but I've tested it in two other computers with no result. When I tested it on the windows xp machine as a slave hd, It wouldn't boot up, which is wierd. Then I got the bsod when I booted up without the bad hd in it. I guess I'll just replace the hd and reinstall the operating system.
Thanks everyone for all your help.

It shouldn't be able to boot up as a slave, but you should be able to read/write to it as a slave. The drive may have just lost its boot partition if it doesn't boot, but that shouldn't keep you from read/write access....

SQ.....

by any chance did you use E-Z BIOS on the disk. This can make a drive difficult to repair when something goes wrong, even if its in a nother computer. If your not sure, best thing to do is obtain a E-Z Bios boot disk and see what hapens. Just a thought, even though HD are cheap now a days, it still sucks to replace them (a lot of us are poor).

DeafLamb

ShadowQueen, I was booting up with the primary master with xp installed and was trying to run the "dead" hard drive as a slave, but xp wouldn't even boot with the other drive connected as a slave to the xp drive.

Deaflamb, I don't know what ez-bios is so I probably don't have it, even though I got this comp from my dads company.

Anyways, I have an extra ten gig drive laying around so I'll just use that. It's not as big as the old drive but it's better than nothing.

Thanks again.