booting problem

[coops]

i have a machine where the slave crashed and I am trying to revive it long enough to get some info off if. when I hooked it up, two things happen during bootup. 1.) no hard drives are recognized even with the jumpers correctly in the master/slave positions or 2.) the master shows up as the primary slave but won't boot because it says there is no operating system.
They are both Western Digital drives, an 80 gig (WD800BB) and a 20 gig (WD200EB)protoge that is giving me the evils. mobo is an ASUS P4PE and the sytem is running win 2k. I have tried different cables but the same happens. remove the dead drive and it boots fine. Why does the dead drive stop the primary from booting? I am off to put evil drive into the freezer....

[SuperSparks]

I don't think that the freezer trick is going to work here, the problem seems to lie with the electronics rather than the mechanical bits. If you can find the identical drive on Ebay or somewhere then you might be able to recover the data by swapping the circuit board. It's quite possible to do that yourself, it's the one job that doesn't require a clean room facility.

[coops]

thanks. I may be able to find one lying around at a friends house, the tricky part will be finding a torx screwdriver

[coops]

I was able to find an identical hard drive. boted up but the same thing happened. tried it again and nothing. left it on the insert disc screen for a while, restarted it and it booted but the drive isn't showning up. On the booup screen the primary disc shows up as wd800bb-00dhd4 while the problem slave drive shows up as only WD205eb (actual drive is WD200EB-00cfs3 or something close to that.) there is an error about a drive in the event viewer about an error on disc0 which is the one that was working. Any ideas on a next step? Is the computer seeing the faulty disc as disc0 before it see the primary or could it be seeing it after and causing the errors?

[coops]

here are a few more things. on bootup, I noticed the first disc has UDMA beside it while the second has Mode 0 which I am unable to change in BIOS.
system properties only shows the main working har drive. when I go to add hardware I get an error message for the problem drive. "unsafe removal of device WDC WD205EB. Use hardware wizard to stop the device" I stopped the device but the drive shows up on boot and the error returns when I go back to add hardware..
on the event viewer, there is a disc error "error was detected on device \Device\harddisk0\DR0 during a page operation."

any ideas to start up this drive even for a few minutes..

[Ridgerunr]

Have you run WD's diagnostic tool to see if there is any hope at all? If it fails, then the only thing I'd suggest is a commercial data recover company such as Ontrack . But they ain't cheap...

[coops]

thanks for the reply ridgerunr, I was just going to come on here and say that I tried that WD tool but it doesn't look good. it has now started a high pitched whine. all I need is 5 minutes to transfer data

[vwrabbit81]

Try GetDataBack for FAT.It could help.Perhaps Diskpatch too.Two very usefull softwares.

[coops]

thanks for all your help. i am trying pc inspector file recovery program as I believe most of the information wanted was on the drive that is working. I did reinstall win2k pro on it so I am hoping it is still there. I started the program last night and as of an hour ago said there was about 6 days left to go thru all the clusters but it has found many lost files

[vwrabbit81]

I have PC inspector filerecovery,but i think GetDataBack for Fat is better.
I tell you about Diskpatch,but it didn´t recover anything,only fix problems when you can´t access to the drive.

Another one is PC inspector SmartRecovery,but it recovers limited file extensions.It is better for smart media,and cameras.

[coops]

vwrabbit, how long did your pc inspector file recovery last? it has been going for about 2 days and has now gone to 22000 odd minutes remaining..but it is find plenty of lost files, odds are most of them useless

[vwrabbit81]

Hi Coops,i didn´t use it in a harddisk yet,i just tried one time,but i didnt like the interface,Getdataback for FAT is easier that pc inspector.I recover all my harddrive using Diskpatch,but my problem was that my drive has lost the master boot,i think,or the partition format,i don´t know exactly,but the drive wasn´t recognized by the bios,nor the system.

If you have this problem,try Diskpatch,it is so fast,..it takes no more that 15 sec.in fixing the boot problem.

Carlos.

[vwrabbit81]

I tell you about Diskpatch,but it didn´t recover anything,only fix problems when you can´t access to the drive.

Sorry,i have made a mistake the other day,and i forget to mend it.
Diskpatch recovers control of the harddisk,for that you can recover your lost files.

Read more features of Diskpatch here->http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/DiskPatch.htm

[coops]

thanks Carlos, will give it a try!