Hi,
I have been on message boards for years, I am a firm believer in trying to find your answer to your question first. I have tried that. Google, and various sites have lead me to nothing. I believe it is my inability to form the right question.
I am a soldier deployed to Iraq. I am the communications chief for my unit.
So basically anything that talks or has electricity falls in my job scope. Just to give a little info about myself, I have been playing with automations for about 15 years. And playing is a good description for me. I can take apart and rebuild computers, I can solve most software issues. I have ventured into various realms of IT from webpages to databases. So I am no dummy to computers but I consider myself a jack of all trades and master of none. Like my job in the military I know a little of this and that, depending on what I have been exposed to through out the years.
I have several computers that have crashed hard. I have an external USB cable
so that I can hook up laptop hard drives to extract data off of them.
Some of the hard drives seem to be recognized but the windows explorer seems
to hang when i open it up and i never see these hard drives in the explorer window. On one or two I have used partition magic to check the drives. One or two just say bad.
One or two do not show at all.
I went to knoppix.net and have created a bootable disk. I put the hard drives
in a Laptop and boot and the Linux does not see the hard drive. A couple of
them say filesystem not recognized. These are the ones that I can see in
Partion Magic, but say bad.
So then i rebooted the computer and checked the BIOS, the hard drive is not
recognized at all.
So my questions are…
1. How can i repair the hard drives that are not recognized by the BIOS?
2. If the hard drive is recognized by the BIOS, but not by WINXP what can I
do to recover the data? Or even use the HDD again?
I see talk of MBR and such and wonder if i am even on the right road.
thank you for your time
SFC Chris COlligan
1-9IN