I have a SATA hard drive that has clearly failed. I installed a spare hard drive on the PC, reinstalled the OS so I could see if Windows could at least see the drive so I could copy data off of it. Windows does not see it, Disk Manager does not see it.
The BIOS does actually see it. I have exampling the jumpers to see if there was anything to change there, but it doesn't appear so.
Are there any tools that can see this hard drive the BIOS sees and attempt to recover the data?
Any tools or advice would be helpful - thanks. I am not apposed to paying for a good cheap tool that can do this - just see so many of them, I'd like to find one I can download to confirm it can see it before I actually pay.
Thanks.
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.
Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
Western Digital provide a tools to analyse your disk : http://support.wdc.com/pro
If you can hear the drive spin up and it doesn't sound abnormal when you power on the computer, you may have an electronics problem rather than a physical failure of the hard drive. On many Western Digital drives you can unscrew and replace the circuit board. It's inexpensive to try and may save your data.
Here's a place that sells the boards, you have to get an EXACT matching board: http://www.hdd-parts.com/w
If you try to run the data recovery tools others are mentioning and they can't find the drive either, that would imply something wrong with the drive (like a bad circuit board) rather than a corrupt file system.
if the disk is recognised in the bios, that means the interface is ok, otherwise it would not "see" it.
i doubt that a logic board can help then, but read on
it looks like the drive cannot be read (or accessed)
depending on the actual failure, you may have :
-one or more bad disk sectors (badly written)
-one or more bad disk sectors physically destryed - no help possible for those sectors
for the first ; these can help :
http://www.dposoft.net/ HDD Regenerator
http://www.grc.com/spinrit
for the seconfd, you'll have to try a data recovery Cy, like this : http://www.gillware.com/
Hey gentlemen - thanks for all your help/attempts to help.
UBCDWin doesn't see the drive - I assume this has to do with the fact Windows Disk Manager cannot see it, but I gave it a try anyway.
WD diagnostics - confirmed the hard drive failure, which was helpful, just recommended replacement - which I did know, but did not allow for any recovery (I'd like to try to save it before I throw it out), But thanks - confirmation it is bad is always nice.
HDDRegenerator is looking promising - it actually sees the bad drive and is currently scanning the drive, if it can repair it, I will be jumping up and down.
I may try SpinRite, but hopefully - I won't have to.
You all have given me at least some things to try to fix my own problem. Thanks again and I appreciate it.
Nobus -
I have run HDDRegenerator - it identified 324 bad sectors, but could only regenerate about 25 of them. Is there any reason to run it again? Will it perhaps be able to regenerate over multiple passes?
Thanks for any info you might have. I ran it - and Windows still refused to see it in Disk Management (bummer!!!!!).
>> but could only regenerate about 25 of them << then i suppose your disk surface is bad...
rerunning it (uo to now) has not yet helped me, but i guess it does not hurt
if you need the data, you may have to turn to a recovery Cy - but if you like trying, spinrite is not bad either
but could only regenerate about 25 of them
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: leakim971Posted on 2009-10-31 at 16:42:32ID: 25712064
Hello jenmilks,
Generaly, if you don't see your drive, it's beacause il really dead.
On windows, go to control panel, administration tools, computer management, disk management, if you're lucky you see your drive here.
If not, it really dead.
What's the brand ? Sometimes constructor provide tools to analyse the disk.
Regards.