Hard drive failure??

mkeats02 · 26 Sep 2010 at 22:04

Hi

So I have a feeling my hard drive my have just failed , I have a Maxtor DiamondMax 22 SATAII 500GB 32Mb Cache Hard Drive and my machine won;t boot up past the bios and the bios doesn't seem to register a hard drive exists.

I have tried chagning leads and sata slots on the motherboard, neither has any effect.

The hard drive spins when the pc powers up but that is all.

So I guess my next option is to buy a new hard drive.

Will I need to obtain a new copy of windows to install? I was running vista 64 bit OEM?

What are the chances of recovering any data from the hard drive?

All help and advice appreciated.

Mike

MoonBoots · 26 Sep 2010 at 22:17

I know your pain - my primary hard drive died last week.

1. As far as I know, the windows license is for the motherboard not the hard drive so it should be fine. You might have to re-activate the license after you re-install windows but as long as you still have the key that won't be a problem.

2.Try the hard drive in a different computer and see if it is recognised...if it isn't I can't see any way to save your data

mkeats02 · 26 Sep 2010 at 22:20

Are services such as the Freecom data recovery service any good?

MoonBoots · 26 Sep 2010 at 22:34

I haven't used it myself, but I expect it would be quite expensive and whatever they do retrieve may still be somewhat corrupted - I wouldn't really recommend it personally but if you have a lot of very important data then it may be worth looking into.

mkeats02 · 26 Sep 2010 at 22:57

Cheers

Will try on another machine,

hopefully won't need another copy of windows once I get a new hard drive

mkeats02 · 28 Sep 2010 at 12:10

Well kind of good news, the hard drive is still under warranty, so should be sending it back to Seagate this week.

I have already ordered a WD Caviar Blue, when I get replacement drive back, I will be attempting to set up Raid 1 to minimse the risk to future data loss.

Is this easy to do?

The new drive will be my primary, and I am guessing I won;t have the replacement for a couple of weeks, can it be set-up retrospectively?

Thanks

Mike

mkeats02 · 28 Sep 2010 at 22:15

Anyone?

If I install a fresh version of windows now, can I change to Raid 1 in a couple of weeks?

I Know that ideally i would have the same drives for Rais, would different drives cause much of a problem?

Thanks for yoir help

Mike