BIOS doesn't find Hard drive

The bad news:the BIOS does not detect my 80gig Seagate HDD, OS Win98SE. It had been working perfectly 'till now.

It's jumpered as master, and connected to the Primary IDE controller slot. Nothing on the 2nd Primary. two opticals on the Secondary IDE.

Using a DOS boot disc, I got into the BIOS and noticed for the IDE devices, it says "none" for all devices.

I reset the device find to "auto," still got no detection. Went back and reset to different, manual settings. Still no detection.

I pulled the HDD, returned the opticals to their secondary IDE cable and at least got the opticals to be recognized. Couldn't do much though, without a hard drive.

I took all the IDE devices off the cables.

I put a different HDD on the same cable and power connector that the "bad" drive was on. This drive has W2K for it's OS.

That drive was recognized, with no problem and booted into the OS.

I added back the opticals to their cable. They were recognized.

I added in the bad drive, configured now as "slave," to the primary IDE cable. Again, nothing was recognized. Not the good drive or the opticals. And the only thing on the keyboard that worked was cntrl-alt-del.

Since the system booted with a different drive and on the same cable and power connector, I assume then, it's not a cable or PSU problem.

On startup, the hard drive does spin, which is good.

However, after being stuck with the BIOS trying to detect it, after a few minutes, it spins down.

I ran the dos test disc from seagate. It doesn't see the drive, either.

I installed the bad HDD in a different computer. That BIOS failed to detect it, too.

I'm at a loss as to what to try next.

The only thing I did before the HDD went bad was remove AVG and load Avast free edtition antivirus. After loading it, I browsed the web a bit, left the comp. running and went to bed. Then this morning on reboot, nada.

I don't want to accept the obvious, that the HDD has died--it made no clicks, no noise, gave no indication of failure, and as I said, it does spin up when the computer powers on.

There's about 40 gigs of stuff that I want that's on the drive. I sure don't want to pay big bucks to try and recover a crashed drive, if that's what it is.

I wonder if taking off AVG and putting on Avast could have let some bug into the firmware of the HDD, or into the BIOS?

I thought about flashing a new BIOS, but since it works with Win2K, wouldn't that mean the BIOS is good?

I get hit with hackers a few times a week: trojans, viruses. (I did some writing for a comp. magazine and seem to be on a hit from that.)

As I think about it, there were a few unexpected crashes after I loaded Avast.

I had it try to find EICAR, which it did, but several times my system crashed while running Avast.

Anyway, that's my sad story.

I really don't have the money to try a data recovery, but I really don't want to loose those important files.

Ideas on how to go about getting the BIOS to recognize the drive will sure be welcome.

Thanks,
Bob

 

I think it's safe to say that this 80gb Win98SE hard drive is dead. You have done everything a human can possibly do. If no PCs (and their respective BIOS) recognize the drive, and the Seagate diagnostic doesn't recognize the drive, then it is dead. The only recourse you have at this point is "to pay big bucks to try and recover a crashed drive". It's time to face the music and "accept the obvious, that the HDD has died". Sorry.
:cry

 

A friend who loves to tinker, had a drive die something like that one did, he went and found an exact working duplicate and switched the controller cards and boom, it was alive. I'm not saying that's your issue but that's the very last thing you could try. If you had a head crash then you'll have this nifty looking platter with dust all over in the casing.

 

thanks for confirming the bad news :cry

I did manage to get the computer to not crash immediately. I let the CMOS (jumper) reset for 10 min.

when the post got all the way through to checking that everything was okay, I was hopeful, even though I saw the drives go by as "none."

And sure enough, no drive.

I do have an identical drive--hmmm--do I dare? How do I get to the controller?

 

Switch out the PCB on the bottom of the drive. I don't know how easy/hard that is. Good luck.

 

thanks, That's what I thought I need to do.

Could sure use some guidance though.

Does anyone have experience with this/

Or know of a website that might give how to's?

(I tried searching, but came up empty--all the references I checked referred to changing a Promise controller card or the like, but not an internal (on-the bottom of the HDD) controller.

If I can do this, it might do the trick (pray, pray). As long as I don't have to crack the case on the drive, I'll give it a go, if I can find out how.

If I have to open the HDD to do it though, I assume I'd run the risk of further damaging the platter, which would make buying recovery services, useless. So, I don't want to do that.

Hopefully one of you will have experience & can walk me through it?

thanks,
Bob

 

ok i have done this with a seagate 80g hard drive i had two of them and they were identical even the firm ware. now this is a rather easy thing to do..BUT U HAVE TO MAKE SHURE THE FIRM WARE IS A MATCH. and they both have to be the same size drive and from the same mannufacturer. hold the two drives in hand and list whats written on the sticker on top of the drive kinda like this......
Barracuda 7200.7
model#................
serial#..................
p/n....................
hda p/n....................
configuration................
firmware.................
thats all i need to see off both hard drives and i will tell u how to do the rest. like i said i have done this with two seagate barracuda 80 gig hard drives and now i have one that works great and passed all the seagate diagnoseis tools.:major

 

ok scratch what i said aperintly my firmware dosent match nore dose the model of my hard drives.....one is a seagate baracuda, and the other is a u series 9 seagate.....but both are 80 gigs and i did swap the chips and now the seagate u series 9 works great. so let me know if u still want to attempt to do this and ill walk u threw this.:major