HDD disappeared after format

Hi all,
just tried to format my secondary 18.6GB HDD Towards the end of formatting, I got the message "Windows cannot complete formatting the disk". The disk was then gone from "my computer". I rebooted, and checked in BIOS, the disk was gone from the BIOS too. I have not touched anything else, hard-or-software wise;the only thing I did was this formatting. What could have gone wrong?!
Thanks for your time.

 

A bit more info about your computer will help... is the RED activation light constantly on while you are booting up ??? if so you could have a bad connection, so a bit more info will bring more replies.

 

Thanks TOKE, my computer is a 2.6GHz, XPpro, with an 80GB WD primary. Computer never had any probs in my 18months. The concerned 18.6 GB comes from my previous PC, so I just moved it from the previous to this one last year, and never had any probs with it either in the past 1 year that I've been using it in the current machine. The HD light flickers as usual during booting - in fact the whole behaviour of my machine is normal, EXCEPT it won't see the secondary HDD anymore. If you came to use this computer you wouln't notice anything weird, and you wouldn't know there's another HDD connected unless you opened the case.

 

The drive could have simply failed. Will it recognize the drive if you unplug your main and set the 2nd drive to master? If you can get it to recognize I'd run a diag on the drive (should be downloadable from the manufacturer's website). If it doesn't recognize the drive, you may be out of luck . You can try moving it back to the older PC again I suppose.

 

Maybe try unplugging ide from bad drive reboot then shutdown and then hook ide cable back up

 

You may be able to utilize drive recovery software such as WD lifeguard tools to find & low-level format the drive. There are various softwares under the drive utilities section here at M.G. Most manufacturer's software (ie: WD, Maxtor, etc) can be used on other drives as well.

 

Try to

 

Dear all, thanks a lot for your helpful comments - I've tried more or less all of them, bought a new IDE and rearranged the case interior. Formatted the disk to NTFS this time, and spent Sunday copying data and backing up, with no problems whatsoever so I can now assume the drive+cable work.
Thanks very much for your help.