HDD problems

My girlfriend has been having probems with her Seagate Barricuda IV HDD. It is about a year old and has been working fine until recently. Last week she recieved an error about not being able to find an OS. I ran system recovery from a Windows 2000 CD and it started working again.

Three days later she turned on her computer after shutting down for the evening there was an error message that no hard disk was found. I opened it up and reseated all the connections. After that I tried switching ribbon cables. Still no hard drive was being detected. I took the hard drive out and put it in my computer and I could also not detected.

I tried switching the jumpers and setting the drive to primary, cable select and even set it as a slave drive. No detection at all and the CMOS setup doesn't see it either. The drive has not been making funny noises at all and it sounds like the read/write heads are spinning. Any suggestions?

Thanks
to all who reply

Find more posts tagged with

SAVE $250 on Your Boot Camp — Use Code "EXAM26"

Exclusively for TechExams members for Infosec Boot Camps starting before April 30, 2026

View Boot Camps

Comments

randalthor100

Download and run Seagates diagnostics.

RussS

Yup - but don't always believe what it says.
I always used to think that it was the best test, but lately I have found otherwise. When you run the Seagate test on a drive with a partitin table on it, then it appears that if there is a problem with the table that the drive may show bad.
Recently a customer had a hard drive fail (crashed heads) and the drive was replaced with a new one. A month or so down the track his machine refused to boot and diagnosis showed the motherboard had lost its timing - also affected CPU and RAM. Replaced MoBo, CPU & RAM - did windows repair on the drive and all was sweet for a week. Then it failed to boot again - the diagnostics showed a faulty drive. I used a data recovery program to scalp all of the data possible off the disk and then used seatools to low level format the drive - ran diagnostics again and it showed good. Reinstalled XP and all is now sweet

Cause of drive fault - corrupted NTFS table.

gojericho0

how can i run seagate diagnostics though if BIOS doesn't detect the drive?

garv221

gojericho0 wrote:

I took the hard drive out and put it in my computer and I could also not detected.

Well...I'm kinda leaning to the fact that it might be dead. If I were you, I would put her drive back in your computer & do everything I can in the BIOS to detect it ,LBA mode. refresh, ect..the basics ya know...Try putting your working drive in your G/F's computer and see what happens to determine if her MB is bad...GL!

RussS

Sometimes ya need to force the BIOS to see it if there is a problem.
Just had one across the desk that had a virus screw the NTFS table - could not be seen in BIOS until I repaired it. Don't recommend that if there is stuff you need off the drive as sometimes it screws it totally requiring a LL format.

gojericho0

thanks for your help guys...still no detection though. someone who works in the ferenzics department at work told me to try and stick it in the freezer for 2 days. I figure I might as well try anything

RussS

2 hours is more like it. Q - does it arc up at all when powered on?