HDD BIOS DETECTION PROBLEM

[adza0975]

My Seagate Barracuda 160gb HDD wont boot to windows. It sits at the MoBo screen for 30 secs, then give an error (3rd master Hard Disk Error). It is a SATA drive and plugged into SATA port 1. I can enter BIOS but that is it.

I have tried other SATA ports (there are 4 in total on the Mobo)

In the BIOS screen, the following is shown

Primary IDE Master [Not Detected]
Primary IDE Slave my DVD Drive

SATA1 [ST3160813AS] the drive that wont boot. This must mean that te BIOS is detecting somehow??

When i hit ENTER on that drive to show its details, amongst other things it shows that the size is 00.0mb

It is also not in the Boot Device Priority to be selected, only the DVD drive.

I have swapped SATA power and data cable to no avail.

The drive also failed the SEAGATE DOS test saying to check POWER and DATA cables. It did NOT fail the SMART test.

Cany anyone advise a way forward. Can the drive be recovered?

I am at the point where I'll buy a new HDD and ran it as a bootable.

cheers,

Adam.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Sorry to hear this. You did well to run the Seagate DOS test and let us know - otherwise you'd get a lot of off-topic guesses.

If you search the forums for "Drive Recovery," you will find several discussions involving people who have downloaded some software or other and scanned the dead drive. On finding that the software can recover files, they are dismayed to find that it costs $90 to get a version that will do the recovery, so be prepared for this. Also, depending on the condition of the disk it could fail to recover anything.

If what is on the disk is really important to you, a professional recovery lab can probably get it back, for thousands of dollars.

And now the advertising plug: Save early, and save often. Do backups.

Could some kind soul write a quick guide to this issue, which seems to come up daily?