Hard drive causes all other IDE devices to hang

MiserlyMartin

Hi, I am trying to get the data off a failed hard drive from my Mothers PC to save it. I have put the drive into a good pc but when this drive is connected it will not boot into windows. It seems to causing the whole ide controller to hang, even when its on IDE channel 2 and the good HDD on IDE 1. It gets past the bios but will not boot windows on the good drive. The bios will see all the drives ok though. Of course if I then remove the bad drive the good drive functions ok again.

(Jumper settings on the drive are correct)
If I put it it onto an ide to USB drive adapter and try to boot the pc, the pc will not even make it past the memory test - it hangs at this point!

I am now trying to put linux on another spare drive and hopefully when thats installed, a linux utility may see the rogue drive?

Can anyone offer any suggestions please? I have never known a problem like this!

darkfibre

Hi,

Based on the information that you have supplied, have you tried booting the PC first on the good drive then connect the bad drive via USB and browse for the files?

I would also agree for you to try this on a Linux machine, I would do the same if the above fails.

zharukkal

If you are comfortable with linux why not connect both drives and boot the pc using a live linux cd/dvd? Then mount the harddrives that you need and copy the files that you want to save.
There is a list of live distros here:
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php
Knoppix would be a good choice for this as it comes with a wealth of recovery programs.

John_0771

how many watts is the psu could be a power surge

MiserlyMartin

Hi thanks for your suggestions. Yes I did boot the pc on the good drive and then tried the drive via USB. The drive just wasn't detected. I did try linux a a live cd but it was running very slowly. I tried to install it on the 'good' spare drive but it crashed after drive formatting and on detection of devices (ubuntu).

Anyway good news: I just found a pin on the IDE connector on the bad drive had broken and had been pushed in. I've had the PCB off and I soldered the pin back. Now I can boot the pc with this drive connected :-) no more hanging (!)

but it still doesn't show up in windows :-(

A good breakthrough but can you advise further please?

globalds

Some people say stick the drive in a freezer for a bit ,then try and run it .
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html

Conor_3

The drive is knackered. Give up. Tell your mother she can either pay between £150-£900 to a data recovery firm to get the info back or restore it from her backups although I get the feeling she's just about to get a harsh lesson in backing up.

weegie.geek

I'd buy an identical (down to the specific model, PCB revision etc) drive, and swap the PCBs over.

vyseyboy

MiserlyMartin wrote: »

Hi thanks for your suggestions. Yes I did boot the pc on the good drive and then tried the drive via USB. The drive just wasn't detected. I did try linux a a live cd but it was running very slowly. I tried to install it on the 'good' spare drive but it crashed after drive formatting and on detection of devices (ubuntu).

Anyway good news: I just found a pin on the IDE connector on the bad drive had broken and had been pushed in. I've had the PCB off and I soldered the pin back. Now I can boot the pc with this drive connected :-) no more hanging (!)

but it still doesn't show up in windows :-(

A good breakthrough but can you advise further please?

Did you remember that you still have to enter the BIOS setup and "discover" it there?

You don't always have to do this, but there's no harm in making sure it's hardware-detected before trying it out in windows.

It isn't a single platter Maxtor 80Gb drive is it?

There's a nasty firmware corruption problem with some batches of these drives - it should still be detected in the BIOS even if it is one of these ones. (I had two, and have avoided Maxtor since, rationally or otherwise.)

MiserlyMartin

Thanks for the suggestions. I got it to work for a bit when cool. I copied a some files that I found with a utility for hard drive recovery. Before I could look for any more it stopped spinning. The worrying thing is that my good windows pc drive has started spinning down on its own now I have the bad one on, so then I got the blue screen of death - as it couldn't find windows to write to any more - no op system! I took the bad drive off now. Have you heard of a bad drives causing spin down problems to spread to healthy drives? Can a fault like this cause a permanent ide problem with a good drive if connected to the same pc?

Not sure if its the PCB or the disc motor? But yes it is knackered!

Conor_3

The bearings have gone in the motor. The only way to get the data back is to send it to a firm that has a clean room and can remove the platters. That'll cost the thick end of £1000.

And yes, bad drives can cause data corruption on good ones.