Make my HDD appear!

[Primus462]

I have a SATA Werstern Digital HDD that I that I only hook up when I am using Ghost to back up my other two SATA HDD. It worked fine for several months: I hooked up the HDD, started Ghost, backed up my two HDDs, and then unhooked my back up HDD.
All of sudden, Windows won't detect the HDD. I tried hooking it up and then powering on the PC and I tried hooking it up while Windows XP was booted.

Any ideas as to what happened?

Thanks!

 

[snyderm]

Its impossible for anyone to say for sure what happened just from reading this, but:

My experience with norton ghost has been abysmal. It alters the Boot record of hard drives in order to perform their copy operations. When some type of exception occurs, the alteration to the boot record becomes permanent. Thus, your drives vanish.

I once wrecked a very important employee's hard drive by this method. Who knew that anyone would be stupid enough to design a backup program that actually makes changes to the original before copying. Luckily, I had recently performed a backup with a different utility.

 

[Primus462]

Thanks for the tip. I've never had any issues with Norton Ghost. I've heard bad things, but haven't experienced them myself. What was the other program you used?

Oh, and I'm very embarrassed to admit that, after almost giving up and buying a new hdd, I realized that the cable was loose where it connected to the mobo! I wasted several hours researching that! Don't know how it happened....

 

[snyderm]

Well, don't feel bad. I once wasted almost two days troubleshooting a computer because the motherboard Power connector came loose. It happens.

I just used windows XP backup utility before I tried to use ghost. Its a good thing I did.

In fairness, I don't know if the newer versions of ghost still make changes to the boot record. They may not. I don't honestly know of any backup or cloning programs that are well liked. The general consensus is that they all suck. All you can really do is backup frequently to minimize any potential loses.