Hard Drive Crash?

[deweylovem]

What is the easiest way to tell if your HD is unrepairable? I have win XP home with SP2. When the pc starts up it only gets to the first screen and starts looking for the ide drives. It doesn't find my hard drive. This pc has been working for 2 years and I put it together. In dos the C drive has no files on it except the ones installed with a dos startup disk.

[Ponch]

In the big line, in case of mechanical failure, hard disks are never "repairable".

What you see as C: in DOS might not be what your "XP Home" C: is. The partitions might be formated NTFS and skipped (given no letter) by DOS. Now if what you see on C: is really on the hard drive, then there is something strange with what you state at first (that the HDD is not found at startup).

[Ludwig Von Cookie Koopa]

Well you need to browse a NTFS HD with another NTFS enabled computer as a secondary drive.

All HD material can be recovered even after being smashed to bits. In your case of the drive being together you need to see in the bootup ( by pressing F1 or DELETE or whatever ) if the HD is appearing and showing all the space like mine would be around 129989MB even if it can go oup to 114GB.

If the HD is not showing all data it might be the data cable ( in my case a IDE cable ) and you need to change the IDE cable with a new IDE cable ( not damage another cable from another computer that you use. Like I broke the IDE cable of other computers from swapping drives threw the cable. ) from a store.

Another thing to do when turning on the PC listen to see if you can even hear the drive. Since this is not a Solid state drive it will make niose from the moving parts when loading. It should allways sound a certain way like my drive was smooth with no niose now I can hear it when I turn on the PC.

Also XP tends to screw around with the BIOS settings and for some reason prevents other HD to load up in the same PC.