Hard drive dead?

[JamesH1]

D drive died after downloading some files to folder on D drive. Drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 40 Gig. Have System Suite 6 virus protection and firewall. Running XP. Rebooted system next day and Drive was not detected. Tried it in other computers with same results. Could an mp3 file contain virus or script that could damage HD? Any other ideas?
Thanks, new to site, JamesH1

 

[rf6647]

Sounds like a goner

In a case like this, go to the manufacturer's web site for diagnostic tools. This site incorporates several from Seagate: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/.

Another approach: changed things a bit. Move drive to secondary ide; jumper as master; use solo on the secondary; use tandem on secondary with cdrom drive. Use cable select. Since this was a working drive as slave on the primary, if any of this works, I would not trust this drive to last much longer. A low level format may rescue drive but destroy all data.

If you have a USB hard drive enclosure, try it. In this environment, jumper drive as master. Watch the balloons as the usb device is reported, followed by any other balloons indicating the drive is reporting itself to XP.

Other threads throughout the forums here reference software packages to recover lost files. Many of these packages use their own techniques to discover hard drives. Kraft posted such a reference in one of the threads I am participating in. Use search/advance search with criteria userid.

 

[JamesH1]

Thanks, I've tried the drive in other computers as master and slave still no detect. If I can detect the drive I should be able to get at the data. I'm even thinking of buying a new identical drive and installing that electronics on the old drive and seeing if I can get to it that way. I'll go to Seagate as you suggest and see whats there.