dead slave drive

**borrowashboy** · October 28th, 2004, 11:58 AM

hi, first post so if in wrong forum please slap my wrist and point me in the right direction. my problem is this:
i have two hard drives, master is a maxtor 60 gig and slave is a seagate 40 gig u series. one day, after 2 months only of use, i was doing some menial task or other over on my slave drive, playing mah jjong i think? when without any noise or smell or anything the pc froze. i rebooted with the reset button and from there it told me i was missing my d [slave] drive. on the start up page it told me the same thing. went into bios and set find as auto, same thing no d drive. in device manager, ditto. my slave drive was gone.
i have tried moving it to another pc, i changed the cable [ide] i tried everything, all the good advice from forums i knew, all to no avail, it was dead and gone.
new approach, any good body on here any idea how to resurrect it? i'll give the details in a mo.
i'm still running windows 98, can't get on with any other and it is now pretty stable. the drive spins when it is powered up, but doesn't show up. i have tried some software called get data back, but that was a no go.
is there some software out there that will let me get data off this drive?
the shop that sold it me was going to give a full refund, but i need data not money. apart from 2 very important lotus word pro docs, everything else was backed up; you've guessed it, i need these 2 docs more than oxygen :-]
sorry to waffle on, but trying to give as much info as poss. any ideas anybody?
borrowashboy.

**confus-ed** · October 28th, 2004, 01:15 PM

Originally Posted by borrowashboy

..the shop that sold it me was going to give a full refund, but i need data not money. apart from 2 very important lotus word pro docs, everything else was backed up; you've guessed it, i need these 2 docs more than oxygen :-]...

Welcome to WD forums borrowashboy.

So if bios won't see it & the shop already offered you your money back, I'd guess they know they have a faulty batch of drives - in which case you are most likely looking at professional data recovery which is expensive ..

What you already tried 'Getbackdata' claims this

Recover even when Windows doesn't recognize the drive GetDataBack can even recover your data when the drive is no longer recognized by Windows. It can likewise be used even if all directory information not just the root directory is missing.

but I think thats pretty misleading, if they'd put when you can't boot from it, it'll do all this, I might have agreed, but if bios can't find it then windows or anything running in it has not much chance at all, it might as well not be plugged in if bios can't see it ..

How helpful are the shop ? - there's a chance its just a controller issue on the drive & if they are feeling helpful & are sufficiently technical they might maybe swap the controller over for you just to recover the data ( I might for a 'good' customer if he asked very nicely etc

) - sorry that's not very encouraging is it ?

**borrowashboy** · October 28th, 2004, 01:31 PM

oddly enough, the shop doesn't sell seagate hard drives at all any more. the last 3 computer fairs i went to, i searched every stall and NONE of them are selling seagates any longer. all are maxtor 7200s. odd?
thanks for reply anyway, much appreciated. i thought of swapping the board, but like i said, i can't get another seagate 40 gig series5 to take the board off.
cheers, borrowashboy.

**cdclintdll** · November 12th, 2004, 03:47 PM

If possible, connect that faulty drive to another PC, preferably one running Win 2k/XP. Connect the drive and see if you could retrieve the drive from there.

I had a somewhat, similar problem but with Win ME. I was able to see the drive, and accessed it.

Good Luck.

**gazzak** · November 12th, 2004, 04:15 PM

You have nothing to lose so you will have to trust me that this isn't a wind up!

Make the failing drive as cold as you can. How do you do that? Obvious. Put it in the fridge. Leave it there for a few hours then try it again. If you're lucky you may see it for long enough to get the small amount of data you need back off of it. If it's a serious mechanical failure then forget it, but as you heard no noise you may be OK.

I have seen this suggested here before, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't, but like I said in the first line you have nothing to lose.

I'll try to dig up a thread where this was suggested before.

(remember I said fridge NOT freezer)