Can't detect Mac HDD in BIOS or Windows

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Deus Gladiorum

Deus Gladiorum

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I'm in the middle of attempting to go through a dead HDD with Mac OS X on it which I think suffered a logical failure. There's still files on it which I'm trying to browse through my Windows 7 PC and some 3rd party program but neither Windows nor my bios can detect it. Obviously it's dead, but I've been able to recover data from previous HDDs with Windows on them which suffered logical failures. I say this suffered a logical failure because when I boot up the PC it's connected to, I can feel it vibrating slightly meaning its active (and I can tell that it's not kinetic energy being transferred from the rest of the machine), but I still can't detect it. I believe it's a SATA drive which I connected through a SATA cable as an internal drive. Any help? Or is this thing absolutely dead?
 
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bliq00

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Mac HDD's are usually formated HFS, which is not readable by Windows. you'll need some kind of software that can read HFS. Alternatively, fire up a linux live cd, and use that.
 
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mbarnes86

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Sep 16, 2010
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Hi

If the problem drive is a SATA or ATA 2.5" or 3.5" hard disk and it is not seen by the PC's BIOS then you have no chance of recovering anything
It is likely some of the the hard drive electronics have failed but the motor is still running

If the BIOS detected the hard disk I would use a linux boot disk such as Parted Magic

or a 15day Trial version of Transmac would give you some idea if there is any useful data to be rescued
http://www.acutesystems.com/scrtm.htm

regards

Mike Barnes
 
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Deus Gladiorum

Deus Gladiorum

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That's what I was thinking too, but here's the thing: I set my bios for RAID now instead of AHCI, and I only have the problem drive connected now. All other drives are disconnected. When I start up, I'm taken to a screen to scan drives and after a couple of minutes I get "Something is wrong with your hardware!". By comparison, I tried disconnecting everything so no drives at all are attached and then I just receive a screen essentially telling me that no drives are connected. So basically, I'm guessing since that when just the Mac drive is connected, and it's able to scan it, then somehow my motherboard or bios must be able to detect it, right?
 
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