Hard drive not detected

womble12345

My parents have an issue with their PC, it will no longer boot. The BIOS diagnostics say hard drive not detected. It is a 3.5 inch SATA Seagate Barracuda 7200 500GB. We have ordered a new hard drive but is there a way I can get some data off this drive before throwing it away? The PC wont recognise it but is it worth buying an external usb enclosure or is that throwing good money after bad?
Has anyone else had any luck getting data off a hard drive that is no longer being detected?

Thanks

rocobiter

How did you get it plugged in? Are you sure you inserted in the correct slot on your mother board? Chances are that it might have crashed and is in an unreadable condition or it has been so since you bought it. It is undetectable means it is unreadable, there is no data in there and is dead! If yes, just discard it. In any case get it checked from your hardware guy. If the the hard disk is within warranty, check the company's T&C contact them and have it replaced.

womble12345

The PC is about 6 years old, has been working fine up to the failure. No-one has opened the case up in the last 6 years.
I took it apart and checked all the cable connections which seem OK, the hard drive gets warm so I assume it is spinning OK. I also tried using other ports for power and data which also didnt work. I think the hard drive is faulty. I just wondered if there may be a way to temporarly resurrect it? I have heard about things like putting it in a freezer, is that likely to help?

Thanks

grumpycrab

womble12345 wrote: »

the hard drive gets warm so I assume it is spinning OK.

Could have died; its GOOD if its not making clicking noises; worth plugging into another computer with something like this
https://www.amazon.co.uk/UGREEN-Adapter-Drive-Supported-Converter/dp/B01GIZSC9G/
(this is specifically for a large 3.5inch drive which needs more power; if its a 2.5inch disk you may get away with a cheaper adapter).
Ask a computer friend/neighbour ? If its got important data you may need professional data recovery...

rocobiter

Am afraid freezing is almost an ice age technique considering the nano amount spaces between the reading head and the diskettes. I suggest another alternative, you can run a live CD of linux distro on your system's CD/DVD drive or external DVD drive. I have done it many times to detect viruses on my system which otherwise was not shown by windows.

womble12345

Thanks. I have already tried the Ultimate Boot CD and the tools on that cannot recognise the hard drive. I also tried 'SeaTools for DOS' as it is a seagate drive but that couldnt find it either.

My parents do have backups but i dont know how good the backups are, sounds like I will be finding out very soon!

esuhl

I had a weird problem where a hard drive stopped being detected by the BIOS. The device identifier it returned was corrupted (so it appeared as garbled ASCII characters instead of "Samsung HDD model X").

To my surprise, it worked fine in a cheap USB adapter, which didn't seem to care about the device name.

AndyPix

womble12345 wrote: »

putting it in a freezer, is that likely to help?

No, that is likely to form condensation on the platter which will make your problem worse.


If the drive isnt clicking, can you hear a very faint, very high pitched tone coming from it when it has power applied ?

were

womble12345 wrote: »

..... We have ordered a new hard drive ....

Hope you have bought an SSD. but to find out if your pc can take SSD, nip to the crucial memory site, and if hey say your model can support ssd, then you are golden.

Freezing a disk has not worked in decades, but if it was a Full height 12Gb 5.25 disk, would be worth a shot, as this was then the spec. Another falacy now that is still perpetuated is to remove the battery to get past the bios.

Heedtheadvice

First thoughts....
I hope things are backed up properly, fingers crossed!

Probability is the drive is at fault but do not discount the motherboard being an issue, it does happen.

As per Grumpy try the drive in another pc preferably via a usb adaptor (in case a faulty drive causes motherboard problem!)

If all else fails and the data is important then there are posts on the forum regarding data recovery.