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Hard Drive does'nt recognize : Detecting IDE...

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by sanketgoel

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I have an external hard drive having an Maxtor IDE. For past one week it has stopped working. By mistake I pulled the USB cord (connecting it to PC) and it has not even powered up since them. Even the LED were not ON.

I therefore took out the Hard Drive and tried to put it as slave to my Desktop PC (XP). I used NO jumpers (no jumper for slave, that?s what is written on top of the HD). When I turn ON it take long time to try to detect the IDE (Detecting IDE?) and when it is done there is NONE on Primary Slave (but something on secondary Master and Slave). After this screen is gone, it says Boot failure, press ENTER to start. Seems like there is some issues with the IDE (from external drive).

Now I thought to buy one 3.5? HD enclosure. Even with this it doesn?t work. The power cable work fine (I checked the power cable for external drive with the enclosure). There is a click sound I hear and that?s it!

Any solution? I appreciate any help and suggestion give. Thanks very much in advance.

2 replies

by maniacman

I think it's safe to say your hard drive is now a fancy paper weight. The clicks you hear are the result of the drive heads scratching the aluminum oxide platters that actually contain the data or the fried controller board on the drive sending the heads into a frenzy. I hope you have a backup of this data because at this point, the drive and the data on it are 99.9999% trashed. Depending on how important the data is and how much money you're willing to spend, you can send it to a data recovery lab, such as Ontrack, where they can attempt to extract the data from the crashed drive in a clean room and recompose it on a new drive, but expect to pay a few thousand, if not more dollars. I think that when you accidentally pulled the USB cable from it, it was writing data and caused the drive heads to go berzerk and damage the platters. You have to be very careful with external USB hard drives and treat them like internal drives and use the Windows device disconnect feature if you wish to unplug it. Don't just simply yank the USB cable from it.

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