Hard disk problem

[mara-]

Hi.

Few days ago my motherboard died. So I decided to by a new computer because I could not find motherboard (it's pretty old). I have two hard disks, one sata 200GB, and one ata 80GB. I want to keep them in my new comp. Sata disk works perfectly, but problem is with ata disk. When guy from service attach it, bios and device manager recognize it, but there is nothing shown in My Computer. I said him to don't touch anything because I really have some important data there. Also in Disk Management nothing is shown. I did not yet tried with win xp cd to see would it be there because hard disks are temporarely at service and I'm waiting for new computer. So can anyone tell me what could be the problem and how can I solve it?

Thanks in advance for help!

Cheers

Edited October 28, 2007 by mara-

[puntoMX]

You forgot to tell us what OS you are using. It’s most unlikely that it’s a hardware problem by the way...

[mara-]

Windows XP SP2 with all updates installed.

Cheers

[bonestonne]

check jumpers?

does it come up as newly installed hardware? if not then you may have to use a linux live CD to get to the data.

do you have plug n play aware OS enabled in BIOS?

those are my only thoughts.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Sounds like no partitions at all on that HDD.

[mara-]

Thank you all for the input. Here's the thing. Everything was working fine on my computer before motherboard died. Partition was created and I had 70GB data on that disk. When I got problem with my computer I took it to service and the guy from service told me that my motherboard is dead. So I asked him to test my hard disks on some other computer (who knows maybe is something wrong with that other computer). One was good, and this other was recognized by BIOS and Device Manager but there was no partitions. As soon as I get new computer with my old disks I'll try first with Bart PE and then with the Linux. If that don't works I'll try with windows xp cd to see will it show anything. If yes I'll do fast format and then try to recover data with some recovery software.

In meantime if you have some extra ideas for me, please post here so I can try it.

Thank's to all again.

Cheers

Edited October 30, 2007 by mara-

[puntoMX]

... I'll do fast format and then try to recover data with some recovery software...

I think you better do this directly, it’s almost sure you will have no success with the other steps. Just remember if it was FAT32 or NTFS before you fast format it.