Hard Drive vanished from bios?

pgi947 · 31 Jul 2011 at 16:35

Hi all, fired up my pc this morning and nothing, the bios posts fine etc, but when I look in the boot list my primary hard drive (containing windows) is no longer there? My dvd writer appears as does my external hard drive just nothing on the internal side of things.

It was working fine last night, there has been no sign of failing up to this point, I'm just stumped as to what the issue could be, I checked all the internal connections, there nice and snug, its connected to the same controller as the dvd writer so thats not the issue.

Has it just died? I was in the market for new drives before this happened, but I'd rather at least save all my installed steam games (about 300gb worth) if it is dead/dying.

The drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 7200rpm 32mb cache sataII

Justintime · 31 Jul 2011 at 16:37

Is it spinning up? sounds like it is failed if all connections are good. Good riddance to a crappy drive (had a few of those exact ones), shame about the data. Hdds don't necessarily give any indication whatsoever of falling over, they just do sometimes.

pgi947 · 31 Jul 2011 at 16:56

I can't hear it spinning up, I'm just about to go open it up and fire it up to double check.

Out of curiosity whats the 2tb mechanical drive of choice these days? I intend to pair one up with a pair of SSD's, probably a 60gb force GT for OS and a 40gb intel 320 for smart cache.

MikeWild74 · 31 Jul 2011 at 19:02

try checking/changing ports/cables, could just be a loose cable.

Muel · 31 Jul 2011 at 19:27

Try plugging a cable known to be working into another socket. Easiest way would be unplug from the optiocal drive and plug straight into the HDD.

Surveyor · 31 Jul 2011 at 19:33

pgi947 said:
I can't hear it spinning up, I'm just about to go open it up and fire it up to double check.

I assume you mean the case and not the HDD?

Don't open up the HDD.

Whatever is wrong with it now will be worse if you do that.

pgi947 · 31 Jul 2011 at 19:53

Hahah no, I mean open up the case, and no its not spinning at all. I will try looping the cable from the optical drive to the hard drive, but wouldn't the drive spin up regardless of the sata connection provided there was power?

The optical and hard drives are on the same ribbon coming from the psu so I can presume that there is power there also.

Its just odd that its insta-dead the morning after it was fine, most dead hard drives i've ever come across have at least given me a little warning.

pgi947 · 1 Aug 2011 at 17:50

Just picked up a 1tb F3, I'll report back if everything is back to working, then I'll see about trying to rescue some data from this broke drive.

pgi947 · 1 Aug 2011 at 20:34

Ok so its installing now to the 1tb drive I just picked up, out of curiosity I left the 'duff' drive in to see if I could manage to recover anything, now the Windows 7 installer picks up the old drive? it says its all 'unallocated space' and the bios still doesn't pick it up.

Could this mean its something damaged on an mbr side of things rather than the suspected hardware side of things? I will be ecstatic if I can recover my steam games/saves.

Surveyor · 1 Aug 2011 at 20:40

Don't install Windows on the new drive with the old drive connected.

Windows may install some files on the old drive so when you take it out the new drive won't boot.

pgi947 · 1 Aug 2011 at 22:11

Nah its ok, I got excited over nothing, forgot I had my HFS+ formatted external still plugged in, which is also 500gb, hense windows seeing it as 'unallocated space'.

Taken the drive out now, going to try some tricks at the weekend to see if i can get it to spin up to rescue my saves but im not holding my breath.