Force Hard Drive Detection

[havoc]

Hey guys, got a question about a fried hard drive. An old system crashed and I am trying to recover the data from the hard drive. Normally I havent had trouble doing this in the past, but it seems that my bios will not recognize this hard drive no matter what I do. The only difference I can see this time is that I am running a sata drive as my master, and the drive I am trying to recover is an ata. Thanks for any help you can give me.

Hard drive: Samsung SV4084H
Running xp pro.

 

[CCT]

You installed it as a slave IDE and it wasn't seen?

 

[raybay]

Your best chance is to put it in another older computer that is ATA, being sure the main hard drive is specifically jumpered as Master, and the bad drive is jumpered as Slave.
It can be very helpful in detection to leave the bad drive in the freezer overnight.
Once you get detection and rotation, continue to remove the data... by drag and drop or whatever software you prefer to use... DO NOT STOP, nor turn off, UNTIL RECOVERY IS COMPLETE as that drive will likely never work again.
We find that some of the older Gateways and IBM Netvista or better work best for this approach.

 

[CraigMc]

If that doesn't work then another option is to use a powered IDE to USB adapter to connect the faulty drive as a removable storage device. This tends to work with 90% of drives that fail to get picked up in the BIOS. If that doesn't work then it is likely that the drive is damaged beyond recovery.

 

[havoc]

thanks guys! ill give that a shot.

 

[Tedster]

ah, if it were only that easy. Get a USB to IDE adapter and try it as an external drive. If it doesn't work, you're stuck.

 

[CraigMc]

I can't quite decide if you are offering the same solution as me or if you are being sarcastic regarding my solution :S

 

[Nodsu]

Tedster is just being himself, don't worry

 

[CraigMc]

Sure thing, it takes me a while to adjust to new forums. Most of the forums I post on often have a high degree of sarcasm, I find myself constantly trying to interpret everything people say just in case, lol