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Hard Drive Recovery

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by mish0969

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My hard drive is giving me the following error message "fixed disk 0 not found". I have tried to run FDISK to locate the partition table, to no avail. Is there anything, short of taking it to a repair service, that I could do to recover the lost files on this drive?

9 replies

by zcuteone

Your IDE cable might not be secure. Try opening the case and making sure the cable is securely seated on the board as well as the hard drive, after you make sure the cables are connected, restart the PC Go to CMOS then do automatic HD detection.

by bsj_molena

When the computer starts up, you will see various messages. Usually white text on a black background. Not to long after the computer is turned on, it will say that your hard drive is dected. It will have the name brand of you hard drive. If you do not see this, check the cable connecting the hard drive to the motherboard. Also go into BIOS, which can uaually be accessed by pressing delete, F1 or F2, depending on the name brand of BIOS your computer has. Find the setting that says IDE devices, or something similar to that. Make sure all drives are set to auto. To do this arrow down to Primary Master, press enter and a list of options will appear. Using the arrows on your keyboard high light auto, or you might have to use you plus and minus keys.

Also when the computer first boots you might see a screen with your computer manufactors logo. You may have to press the ESC or tab key to make it disapear so you can see the messages that the computer gives during bootup.

by olever

after having followed 1st&2nd answer I would install a 2nd drive and use copy from the dos to copy the precious files from your funny drive to the 2nd -as long as your drive file system can be read by dos.: fat fs. won't work with NTFS.
but sure cmos should detect the drive: data cable problem,

by thechas

When you turn on the PC, does the hard drive perform it's internal self test?

You should be able to hear the drive spin up and the heads seek across the drive.
The HDD light should also light.

If this does not happen, you either have bad cables, a bad IDE controller on the motherboard, or a dead hard drive.

Start by disconnecting the IDE cable from the drive.
If the drive now runs it's self test, the problem is the cable MB, or a second device on the IDE channel.

If you have a second device connected, make sure that the jumper settings are correct for both devices.
If you have only the HDD, make sure that the jumpers are set properly for a single drive.
(many HDDs require different jumper settings when used as a single as oppossed to a master w/slave)

If the drive does not run it's self test with just power connected, try a different power connection.
If that fails, the drive is dead.

If the drive is dead, you might try some of the suggestions in the Tech Republic dowwnload "200 ways to revive a dead hard drive"

Chas

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