Have I killed my HD or did it die of natural causes?

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moriarty

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I have (or had) a Windows 2000 system with a 20GB Fujitsu MPG3204AT. This was partitioned as a 12GB 'C' drive and the remaining 8GB unallocated. I wanted to partition the free space to use as storage, and thought this would be safest from within Disk Management in Win 2000. I created an extended partition in the free space and created a logical drive in the partition and all seemed to be OK until I attempted to re-boot and found that the BIOS can now no longer detect the drive at all. I have set the drive up on a spare m/board and this could not detect it either.

This system has always had an intermittent tendency to hang for about 30 secs during IDE drive detection at boot-up, but I always believed it was a m/board fault. Is it just a coincidence that the drive finally failed totally just after I had created a drive in the free space? I didn't think anything I did in the software could affect the ability of the BIOS to detect the drive. Is there anything I can do to recover it?
 
20gig?
Partitioned?
Recover?

Are you saying that you had important data on your old 20Gig partitioned harddrive,
And it is now not showing in Bios, since further partitioning, and you want to recover it?

They do have really good magnets in them, but as for any other use, not for ~ 6 to 10 years ago. Too slow and too old

I'm going to quote some free recovery tools now, whilst I roll my eyes :rolleyes:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads38.html
 
OK, I'm a cheapskate, and yes, the magnets are excellent for retrieving lost screws etc! The fact is the drive was my fastest apart from a rather doubtful 40GB ATA-133 which I don't trust enough to use.

Fortunately, the drive doesn't contain any irreplaceable data as far as I can remember. The system was one I used mainly for trying out software before I installed it in my main everyday machine (650MHz PIII - stop sniggering over there!).

If it is purely a HD failure it seems odd it occured immediately I attempted to create partition in the spare space. I suppose there is nothing for it but to return to my other backup machine (350MHz PII would you believe).
 
At least it isn't a PII 300 (the 350s FSB was much faster I believe, making that 50Mhz over the 300 feel more like 150Mhz :) - I owned both at one point).

Partitioning shouldn't have any affect on the BIOS, so it could just be an incredible coincidence. When you set it up on another system did you be sure and get the jumper setting correct? If so, then that tends to confirm that the drive did die. bummer.

BTW - I've got an old 4 gig IDE holding Windows 2000 Professional on a Jetway motherboard with a Via C7 because something is weird with that board and I can't manage to get an OS installed to the sata drives. So there are a few of us still running ancient HDs.
 
I think you're right, and it must be a coincidence, or perhaps the strain of an extra partition just pushed the poor thing over the edge. In retrospect, the intermittent boot hang had became a lot less intermittent over the last week or two!
 
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