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BIOS will not detect my hard drive

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by dittocookie

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I have several hard drives, but the two I want can not be detected and then it says "No Operating System Found" I don't think it is my BIOS since it works with other hard drives. The two hard drives are Maxtor and I want to find a way to read from those hard drives

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by oh smeg

BIOS will never give a message of [b]No Operating System Found[/b] this is a POST Message telling you that the HDD has no OS that is readable.

If these drives just have data on them then that message is correct if they are used as a Boot Drive they will not have an OS installed and hence are unable to boot from them But they should be readable as a Slave Drive provided that you are not using Vista as your OS and the Drives where formatted with XP or an earlier version of Windows.

f you are unable to mount these drives as a Slave you can fit them to a USB Enclosure and read them from there but the same still applies if you are using Vista and the drives where formatted with XP or earlier OS.

If the drive is shot they will also be impossible to boot from so you could run the makers Test Utility to check the drive and have the computer boot from the Floppy of Optical Drive depending on what you have.

If you are really convinced that the drive is actually working you can boot off a Live Linux CD and then set about reading the data and saving it to another drive that was formatted with the same OS that you are currently using.

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