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23 Sep 09 - 01:48 PM (#2729778) Subject: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: GUEST,frustrated and bewildered I generally just let my pc go into sleep mode when I go to bed at night. Well, this morning it recognized the touch on the keyboard to wake it, but windows would not show up on the screen. I reboot, now the hard drive is no longer detected. I went into the BIOS and it is not listed there. I have tried to reseat the drive, but with no luck. I am at a loss. |
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23 Sep 09 - 02:29 PM (#2729800) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: Bernard Sadly, it seems it has shuffled off this mortal coil. They do that sometimes. Not much you can do other than buy a new drive and reinstall... There are people who can retrieve data from deceased drives, but it tends to be prohibitively expensive due to the time it can take and the actual fault on the drive. I'll not bore you with unnecessary detail...! You may just get lucky and the drive leaps back into action after being left for a while - if it does, use the time to migrate it to a new drive because it won't be reliable. |
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23 Sep 09 - 10:35 PM (#2730139) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: M.Ted Ignore Bernard, and anyone who tells you to just give up without a fight. I can't give you any specific tips, because I use a mac not windows, but I googled "hard drive not detected" and I found a number of different suggestions. Just keep checking them out and trying the fixes till you run out of suggestions. You should go to the website of the hard drive mfg, and do a bit of research on your BIOS, as well. There are a lot of things to rule out before biting the bullet. |
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23 Sep 09 - 10:43 PM (#2730146) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: EBarnacle First, remove the hard drive and spray the electrical connections with contact cleaner--just a little--you want to clean it, not drown it. It is quite possible that the contacts are slightly corroded. Reinstall the drive. If that does not work, ask a competent technician to check it out. |
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24 Sep 09 - 04:41 AM (#2730224) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: John J I think 'ignore Bernard' is a bit strong - his advice is sound. That's not to say that a successful fix may be found but hard disk drives are electro-mechanical devices, and whilst they are inherently very reliable they are certainly not 100% reliable. Bearings fail, capacitors dry out, resistors go high...the list goes on. And on. Any commercial user would simply not risk relying on a drive that has failed - even if it has been repaired. The cost of a replacement drive on the average home machine is not really prohibitive. I'm assuming that it's the drive that has failed and it's not a motherboard fault! IMHO go with Bernard's suggestion of replacing the drive whilst continuing to try to revive the old drive....and if indeed you are fortunate enough to get the thing to fly again, copy the information over to your new drive. Good luck with it! John |
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24 Sep 09 - 07:17 PM (#2730765) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: M.Ted I didn't suggest that Bernard should be shot--that would have been strong, and wrong;-) , John, the replacement suggestion assumes that the hard drive is malfunctioning--certainly a possibility, but a waste of money if, for instance, the problem is a corrupted driver, or a problem with firmware, or, as may be even more likely, a virus--then there's the possibility that it is the motherboard. |
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24 Sep 09 - 08:08 PM (#2730783) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: Bernard I work with computers, and a hard drive that cannot be seen, given the circumstances of failure in the opening post, is usually a dead 'un. I'm betting that substituting another drive to see what happens would confirm it - and would save a lot of time. It certainly isn't a corrupted driver, because the drive won't show at boot - it doesn't require a driver for that! It's also very unlikely to be a virus, because that would kill the motherboard. It is unlikely to be a power supply problem, either. At one time I'd have agreed that something else could be the problem, but hard drives are becoming less reliable as prices tumble and capacity soars. I've got a box full of drives that have gone the same way. I only hang on to them because I can occasionally retrieve the info off another drive by using bits from an identical one with a different fault. Sometimes it's the spin motor, sometimes it's the controller card, and occasionally it's the voice coil. The voice coil (head arm actuator) is the only part I shy away from fiddling with...! My earlier post did suggest you may get lucky, but in my experience I doubt it. I'll even go so far as to suggest a case fan may have failed, causing the drive to overheat... for future reference, download a little programme called 'SpeedFan' - it's free, and can be used to monitor temperatures, voltages and fan speeds (there's a surprise!). |
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25 Sep 09 - 01:26 AM (#2730893) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: M.Ted I defer to your superior knowledge, Bernard--even still, I just had a hard drive disappear Tuesday and have managed to get it back today. I must be doing something wrong. |
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25 Sep 09 - 03:58 AM (#2730931) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: GUEST,Goodlife far too technical for me , but can i suggest buy a new drive and set it up if the computor does not recognise the new drive then it leads you into thinking about other problems if it does then put your old drive in as a slave drive and see if you can read it that way if you are unsure of how to do it take it to a computor shop and ask them to do it please let me know if this works or not cheers |
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25 Sep 09 - 02:01 PM (#2731246) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: Bernard Drives do disappear occasionally within the operating system and are normally recoverable, but when a BIOS can't detect them they are usually defunct... except when someone's been fiddling inside the machine and dislodged a cable. Not the scenario here. Hey ho! |
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25 Sep 09 - 04:25 PM (#2731359) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: GUEST,Greg Back in the "old days" you could sometimes wrap up a drive in plastic or a zip baggie and put it in the freezer for a couple of hours to get it to "revive" for a few minutes (to transfer the data to a good one) but...I haven't tried it in quite a while. |
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26 Sep 09 - 10:19 AM (#2731768) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: Bernard Hmmm... sometimes people don't tell you the full tale... maybe because they haven't thought it through! A friend of mine was having trouble with his printer, and the trouble only started after he was clearing some space on his hard drive. Reinstalling the driver hadn't worked, and rolling back XP to a date before the problem had also been unsuccessful. He'd noticed the hard drive was getting full after he started downloading images and video at hi-res from his new camera, so he cleared some space. However, to plug the camera in he had to unplug the printer...!! Just thought I'd share that with you! On the up side, he got 1.5Gb of drive space back when we deleted all but the most recent restore point, a thing he'd never done in all the life of the PC. It's a good thing to do if you know the machine has been reliable for a reasonable time. |
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26 Sep 09 - 06:13 PM (#2732074) Subject: RE: Tech: Hard drive not detected From: fumblefingers Check the cables first. |