Tech support call.

If it isn't seeing anything, it sounds a lot more like problems with the drive electronics than data problems on the platter. You said he tried it in a different computer... did he try using a different cable? If it's a PATA drive, did he try manually setting it to Master (rather than cable select) and sticking it by itself on an IDE channel? (Bad slaves can keep their masters from being detected.) Did he try a known-good power connector, and is it possible the power supply is going bad and not giving it enough +12V juice?

If none of these help (and, unfortunately, they probably won't) then a data recovery service is probably the only option. The good news is that it's likely they'll be able to recover everything (simply by putting on new electronics) and the bad news is that data recovery services are horrible capitalist vultures who would charge you $20 for a cup of water if they thought you were really thirsty.

Good luck!

Hmm, good questions. The disk, AFAIK is ATA-100. I'm pretty sure he tried with another cable since he probably didn't move the cable around from computer to computer. Same with the power connector. Different PSUs also.

I also failed to mention that it shows on both computers during POST. I'm pretty sure it's on cable select, but from my thin memories of both computer, it probably ended up slave on both.

As for data recovery service, yeah. He actually got a 1000CAD quote from one of them. I'll try everything I can before contacting them. [grin]

Thanks !

Ooh, the drive was detected at POST? That's definitely good news (and there's probably no need to bother with the cable stuff). Yeah, throwing software-based recovery tools at it is the best bet. My guess is that the master partition table got overwritten, a state of affairs with which Maxtor's diagnostics would be perfectly happy. If it was only one partition on the disk, recovery should be a piece of cake.

Quote:

Original post by Sneftel Ooh, the drive was detected at POST? That's definitely good news (and there's probably no need to bother with the cable stuff). Yeah, throwing software-based recovery tools at it is the best bet. My guess is that the master partition table got overwritten, a state of affairs with which Maxtor's diagnostics would be perfectly happy. If it was only one partition on the disk, recovery should be a piece of cake.

Yeah. I specifically told him not to attempt anything that hints at the fact that it will attempt to modify the disk. For all I know he could end up installing OS/2 on there from thin air. [grin] I'll attempt to salvage the thing when I visit him.

Thanks !

Would it be worth while remapping the drive to a drive letter? I've had windows "forget" about a drive once. Just had to re-assign it a drive letter and all was well!