HD Undetected

I have a self made comp, with a 10gb harddrive that uses windows me... I recently reformatted... I was in the middle of talking to some friends on the net when my computer just froze... Then when I rebooted it, cmos said it had no hard drive... I went to the cmos setup and it said nothing was there... I kept removing the cable and replacing it, and such trying to get it to detect it... I have no second working harddrive... When I get into mode dos mode using a windows me startup disk and the windows me cd and I try to use fdisk, the computer says there is no fixed disks... I don't know what to do, I've never come up to this problem before...is there anything I can do to save my hard drive?... I have a lot of documents on it I wrote, and I do not wish to lose them...

 

What kinder hard drive is it? More details please.

 

the paper on it says TriGem, SV1022D/TGE...its from Samsung Electronics...10gb...thats about all I know

 

does the drive sound like it's spinning? have you put the drive on another power cable?

 

yes I hear the drive spinning. I know for a fact its not the power cable, seeing how I took it from my cd rom, which was working perfectly.

 

shake it...do you hear a rattling noise?

j/k...don't really do that.

try and reset cmos (pull batter for at least 30 seconds). have you tried the other ide channel on your motherboard? do you happen to know someone that would let you stick the ailing drive in their pc to see if it booted?

 

Have you tried swapping out the 40-conductor data cable? A bad connection on the right (wrong?) line of the data cable could leave the BIOS thinking that there is no drive attached to the controller.

Sometimes, just removing and reseating the cable at both ends will restore a flaky connection. Temporarily. I've had some success with a contact cleaner.

Just make sure that you put the data cable back the same way around as it was when the drive last worked. And make sure the cable is fully seated. It's easy to mis-align the plug by one row on the header; it's just as easy to put Line 1 at the wrong end of the header. I've done both (by accident) at various times. When you do either, the BIOS cannot see the drive at all.

Unfortunately, it's also possible that your drive electronics have died. If so, it may be possible to recover your data by swapping the drive's circuit card with a known-good circuit card from an identical drive. The hardest part is finding one.

 

If you have tried 2 cables, and tried the drive on the Primary & Secondary IDE bus knowing the CD-ROM works, then the drive may be defective.

Check it's warranty.

 

hmm...well, I don't think its my cables or anything with the pc itself...I fixed a broken hd I have, (and by fixed I mean I put it in and it works), and its working perfectly...so its probably the hd...its probably dead...I didn't shake it, so I didn't hear any rattling...lol...