Is my mates hard drive dead?

[JimmyBoy]

hey guys

basically my mate started his pc up today and noticed his secondary hard drive (E wasnt showing up. he cant access any of the programmes installed on it either. but it is showing up in the bios, he hasnt opened his pc up in ages so it isnt an incorrect jumper or loose cable

could the drive be dead?? is there anyway to find out? any programes outside of windows or anything ??

thanx a lot people

[Norky]

Drives usually give fair warning before dying. Ask him if he noticed any clicking and clunking which he ignored

[JimmyBoy]

which he ignored

lol do u know him then? sounds like you do with a comment like that

[awesome-o]

Haha cheers jim. Its my comp btw. Basicly i have 2 hdds. One 40gb with windows ect on and a 200gb with random crap. My computer started being a little slow earlyer today but i thought nothing of it. Went to play some music earlyer and nothing would open. Looked at the E drive but nothing was there. If i go into my computer there is no E drive there.

I then went into the device manager and again nothing there. I refreshed the devices and it detected the hdd but then the computer ran so slow it was stupid. Ive tried this twice with nothing Its alos detected in the bios. No weird sounds or any notice that anything was up. Could it be a virus ?

Any help would be great theres alot of important project work on there which i havnt backed up yet

Cheers guys.. xx

[d3fiant]

have u enabled smart in the bios, will give u a heads up if its a hardware fault or failure. Some 3rd party apps can query the smart status from within windows, try dl an analysis tool from the manufacturer of the drive or post the brand here so we can give u a direct link

[zhenboy]

S-ATA or IDE? Did he change the bios settings?

[technophreak]

My D drive did this to me a few weeks ago. I went into the BIOS to see if it was there, which it was. I rebooted my PC a few times and it appeared again. No idea what happened though.

[d3fiant]

been there many a time

[vincent]

what are the makes of the HDD?

[awesome-o]

Its a westerndigital 200gb and a maxtor 40

[awesome-o]

Ive tired the WD software in windows and it wont detect the hd Only the 40, is it safe to say its dea or is there anyway i can still save stuff ?

[zhenboy]

did u try the hd on another computer?


have a look in bios see if the bios detects the hdd...

[vincent]

i woudl suggest the floppy software in BIOS

as in-download the Utilities -copy them to floppy and let it do the work

for Western Digitals Hard drive BIOS utility- Here "Download Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for DOS (Floppy) "

follow the instructions -reboot PC with the floppy in the drive And run the EXTENDED TEST option

Maxtors version is called PowerMax which is available here

Same thing follow instructiosn and run full scan test to find any errors

[JimmyBoy]

well, ive just been imformed that the hdd suddenly came back to life, has he taken his oppotunaty to back everything up??

i dought it