kerunt

Hi all,

Yesterday I put together a budget computer to be my media center/file server, and I've been having nothing but problems since.

My main computer was using three hard drives:
- Western Digital SATA 160GB 7200RPM 8MB
- Western Digital SATA 500GB 7200RPM 16MB
- Western Digital SATA II 650GB 7200RPM 32MB

Instead of buying new hard drives, I wanted to use the second two in the new machine, so what I did was create a new (primary) partition on the 650GB drive to install Windows on. During installation the new computer did not see the second (500GB) drive. After the installation it was also not able to see the second partition (with tons of my data) on the 650GB drive. Or rather, it saw that it was there, but it was unaccessible and could not be formatted.

Through countless hours of cursing and headbanging, I've managed to recover the key data from the second partition of the 650GB drive on to my 160GB drive in the first computer. I then (after more problems) got Windows to format that partition, and the new computer now recognizes it. Hooray.

But there's still the problem of the 500GB drive. The new computer does not want to boot whenever it's connected. If I check the connected devices in the BIOS, it shows that something IS connected, but it is unable to recognize it as a hard drive or give me any information about it.

What's worse, now my original computer is doing exactly the same thing. Basically the hard drive which was working 100% fine 2 days ago now cannot be used on either computer. And this just happens to be the drive that contains all my music and around 400GB of movies... I would really like to get it back.

I've tried different cables and different (all) ports on both motherboards. Nothing gets this hard drive to work. I've tried resetting bios settings.

Neither computer is overclocked (I know that can sometimes cause problems with SATA drives).

First (original) computer is using the Asus P5N32E-SLI motherboard, and the second (new one) is using a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R.

If I could at least boot up with that hard drive and recover the data on it from Windows, that would be enough. I could then format it, and put the data back. But, it won't boot.

Is there anything I can do? Please help, I've been struggling with these problems for about the last 30 hours (minus 8 for sleep) - can't get any work done.

danewfie

put the drive into an external case ... and connect via usb ... then try to recover your data that way.

if that didnt work, its possible that at some point an electric shock happened to the drive and fried something.

kerunt

Thanks for the tip, danewfie. I'll try that out.

kerunt

Well that didn't help.

I have this nGear cable package which lets you hook up SATA drives via USB. Tried it out and I can feel the disk powering on, but no go. Windows detects external storage, but it never shows up in explorer.

Tried it out through my system's external SATA. (Once Windows was booted up.) Nothing. Went to device manager and ran a check for new hardware. System crashed. Rebooted and windows started loading. As soon as it got to the login screen, system crashed again.

I tried the same thing on the original computer - no luck. I'm trying out a tool called Parition Table Doctor right now, and on start it gives me this: Warning! Harddisk 2 Heads is 1, Sectors is 1. If PTD cannot find the correct partition for you, you may try to access CMOS setup program and change the LBA mode settings on harddisk 2.

And when I click OK on the warning, an error comes up: Error: Boot signature of harddisk 2 error.

Going to try that out...

kerunt

Tried everything I could... no luck. About a half dozen partition applications, data recovery apps, western digital utilities, tried recovering under ubuntu, tried a Gentoo recovery CD, nothing. Closes I've come was Patition Magic 8 throwing error 100 ("Bad Partition") when I tried starting it up while having the 500GB drive connected through USB.

Guess it's a lost cause and I'll have to accept that data as lost.

The drive is still under warranty, but I don't know if I should RMA it. There's quite a few downloaded movies and mp3s on there - safe to RMA it?

kerunt

So, all of a sudden Windows decided to recognize that drive (over USB) like there was never any problem. Damn POS. Copying my files off of there right now, before it has another change of heart!

Struebel

have had that problem b4 too, I used to reinstall my os once a month due to not having any anitvirus (dumb). You will be able to keep the Drive, Just Have GWScan run a test on it and then Complete Format (full erase/Full Zero write) your drive will work as long as the heads and other components past the 1st test of this software, best part is its made By Western Digital, Works with other drives tho 2 (if there sata). Good Luck! Hope this helps you!