Has the hard drive been killed?

I have been given a pc that will not boot.

The guy who it belongs to said he tried to formatt a disc, i presume a cd but looks like he has done some sort of botched formatt of his C drive.

At the moment the bios does not see the hard drive. A linux live cd does not see the hard drive and no luck with a hirens boot cd either seeing the hard drive.

I have tried disconnecting it and connecting it back up and i have tried it as a slave drive in my pc but still no luck.

Because the drive can't be seen by anything i have tried i am not able to access it save any data or even try a re formatt on it.

Has he completely nuked his drive or is there something else i could try that i all ready haven't.

Thanks for any help given.

VirginMedia 20meg

If the drive isn't even recognised as a slave on your pc it does sound incredibly dead.

When installed as a slave have you tried booting the pc and looking in the bios setup to see what the bios of a working pc thinks is there. Very slim chance you may be able to force it to recognise a disk of some sort. But it doesn't sound too hopeful.

Edited by eebdsirhc (Sat 04-Jul-09 20:45:59)

Are you sure you have fully explored the Hiren's drive utility section? Several of the utilities contained therein will "see" a drive even if the BIOS can't.

Edited by Deadbeat (Sat 04-Jul-09 21:14:49)

I believe so. I have tried the hard disc tools and tried the MBR tools and also file recovery tools but nothing picks up the drive. It's as if there isn't a drive plugged in.

VirginMedia 20meg

Had a llook in the bios and it does not show up. As i have said in the post above it's as if a drive isn't even plugged in.

VirginMedia 20meg

Or another thought ......

Most disk drive manufacturer's provide downloadable disk diagnostic boot disks.

Download the file from whoever manufactured your now suspect drive, then follow the instructions to create a bootable disk with the diagnostic software on. Set the pc to boot from the disk and it will guide you through the tests.

As it is standalone and bootable you can do it from either your pc with the slave drive, or from the original pc.

Note - if you have Maxtor disks this can be a very cheap (i.e. free) way to get hold of Acronis TrueImage (or at least it used to be). But the version of TrueImage has been "fixed" so that it will only run on systems with Maxtor drives.

With the original disk manufacturer's own diagnostics you may be able to force a reformat.

Edited by eebdsirhc (Sat 04-Jul-09 21:34:32)

Try manually entering the drive paramaters in the BIOS and then running HDDRegen.

Silly thought --- so apologies in advance.

When you moved the drive from being the master in the old pc to being the slave in the new pc - did you check the jumpers on the disk - to change it to either slave or cable sensing ??

Replied to wrong poster?

The boot CD that the OP refers to (Hiren's) contains just about every drive manufacturers utility plus a whole lot more.

Replying to wrong poster --

Sorry - just me bring lazy.

I always view the threads "flat", then normally just reply to the chronological last post.