Hello everyone, please if you can help me in the slightest it will be of great help.
My sisters computer has decided to stop working.
It is an athlon xp 1800, 256 ram, 40gb maxtor hd, ati radeon 64mb, onboard sound and netgear network card. also asus a7v8x-x motherboard.
Well it gets the the POST screen and scanning for devices and it doesnt find the hard disk, n.b. everyother piece of hardware is!
Tried running powermaxtor and it cudnt find the HD either. Any ideas what is wrong.
Also any good tools to recover stuff from a hard drive that isnt even detected by the motherboard
Download the Maxtor powermax tool, load it onto floppy and boot up pc.
It will allow basic low level testing of the HDD, if the drive is broken this will show you.
Ok well, i went back and ran powermax again, this time the computer strangely didnt come up with any errors and detected the hard drive and i ran a few tests.
i did a quick test and its said to do a full test, which didnt seem to go anyway, so i did a burn in test and it failed.
Is there anyway of getting more info on whats wrong with this drive?
Do you think its faulty?
It is quite old and had a few problems with it stalling before.
N.B. the room earlyer was very warm as it at very top of house and it a warm day, tonite it is alot colder and it seemed to work then, could have it been something to do with that?
Chances are if it can't pass all the tests, then it has died.
You could check the cabling is okay, take off the IDE and power cable and reset them.
Maybe take the drive out if you think its overheating and connect it outside the case.
If possible, just connect it to the PC you're working on now, make sure the jumper is set correctly (master/slave/CS) and then see if when you boot into windows you can see the additional drive and whether it shows as damaged.
It could also be the controller on the PC it is in, so unless you have a seperate way to test the drive, or another drive to try in the faulty PC it's going to be difficult to confirm 100% where the fault is.
If you have or can get an external USB drive caddy, you could also fit it in there and test it on any PC with a USB port.
The minimum that will happen is you'll see a USB device come up, but you may not be able to see the HDD if it is that which is broken.
