[RESOLVED] HELP Please

[pennydog]

Yes we tried all that, did not work. We shut it down for the night and the next morning it said the bios was not found.

We have installed a new hard drive, but want to get our info off the old one. The computer still will not recognize the old hard drive.

What type of virus may we hve gotten that corrupted the config files and then ate the bios?

[Jonnybumkin]

hello pennydog
I recently worked on a computer for my daughter that also would not recognize the hard drive. The suggestion made earlier was similar to what helped me fix mine.

unhook all power to the computer. remove the side cover
look on the mother board for a "silver" battery that is about the size of a quarter. take it out. now while the machine is unplugged press and HOLD the power button for between 30 seconds to 1 minute. (to drain any residual power in the system) replace the battery and put the computer back together. When I did this mine recognized the dvd drive and the hard drive. Mine was also so badly infected that I then had to do a complete fresh install but hopefully this will let you boot up and then you can follow the previous directions for fixing the initial problem

[ttodd]

Slave the old hard drive to the new computer, and then when the PC sees the second HD- start pulling over your files to the new HD,, You will not be able to pull over programs,, just files such as .doc / .jpg / .xml /.mp3 ( etc..)

[pennydog]

Here is the latest info on the hard drive problem. We installed a new WD EIDE hard drive(160g) as the master drive, the original hd is a WD SATA(200g), BTW, which is the better hard drive? The new hd(the EIDE) was setup with Win XP and is working properly, we would like to use the SATA hd as a slave but BIOS will still not recognize the SATA (original hard drive). We have SO much information (over 50 photo albums) on the original hd, is there any way to retrieve this info? Would the removal of the motherboard battery still help?

Thank you all for your help.

[ttodd]

Take a look in the BIOS and under advanced you should be able to see the motherboard settings for the drives. Make sure that the board is set to use ENHANCED settings and not LEGACY, then go to the BOOT section and make sure the SATA drive is the first drive. Find the setting for Plug and Play operating system elswhere in the BIOS and make sure this is set to NO.
I don't think removal of battery at this point will help any.,

I Don't know which is the better HD..

[SuperSparks]

Unfortunately the way the drive is not even being seen by the BIOS or Windows means that it is almost certainly the drive's electronics that have died. The good news is that the data will be intact. The bad news is that the only way of getting to it is to replace the PCB. To do that means aquiring an identical HDD (identical down to the fiormware revision), and swapping the circuit boards over. Fortunately that is the one operation that you can do yourself outside a clean room. Otherwise you can take it to a data recovery specialist, but they are very expensive.

[pennydog]

First off, thank you everyone for the input. Here is what we have done as of last night; we took the new HD out, we ran a copy of Norton Ghost. It found no cooties on the hard drive, but it also found no restore point. All data was intact and we felt good about that at least. We unplugged the HD and moved it up to the next port, took the battery out as suggested above and rebooted. Low and behold it came to life, slow to get thru the bootup screens, but the OS loaded in and everything seemed fine. The system date was back to 2002, but we set that and ran the defrag etc. I am not sure what will happen when we reboot tonight, but all looked good last night. We are going to take it to the shop that built it for us and have them install the new HD as a slave and do some upgrades for us. At least it will not cost a small fortune to get our data transferred. We decided running the Norton Ghost would not hurt since the HD was down anyway.

We are not sure which of the 3 things we did actually fixed it and wishing now we had done one at a time so we would know. Again, thanks for all the help/suggestions.