Hard Drive Strangeness (Sadly I need help A.S.A.P.)

**Niclo Iste** · July 2nd, 2009, 10:58 PM

Normally I wouldn't pull a I need it as soon as i can because I have to get it done tonight kind of thing but my employer ate up my whole tech bench night teaching me the fine art of conning clients out of money... Don't ask I'll talk of that later. I have a laptop that bluescreens when it tries to boot into vista. I slaved the drive into my win7 machine. It sees the drive but only as a big fat 0 sized drive that can't be accessed. However if I log into partition magic or acronis's partition manager they claim the partition is fine and can see it. If I try using a windows installation disk to run the recovery console it says that it can't find the drive. So has anyone else come across this? As far as things look to me his data is pretty much gone until I reinstall windows and try to use data recovery on a formated and reinstalled drive.

**NooNoo** · July 3rd, 2009, 02:46 AM

OK first question - what is the bsod text, error message, error numbers and filename?

Have you tried looking at the drive slaved to an XP machine?

Have you tried imaging the drive to get the data and then exploring the image?

Does you win7 bios see the drive when it is slaved?

Does the laptop bios see the drive?

**maced** · July 3rd, 2009, 10:01 AM

My first thought is that since it gives you a BSOD, it is launching the OS but chokes during boot. Possible boot sector sector problem or MBR.

Another thing to look at in the lappie BIOS is whether or not the hard drive has had a password assigned to it (you didn't say if this was one of the new laptops or an older one). If so, this could be a potential stopper when you slave the two systems.

Noo Noo was poking in the right direction as the BSOD error would at least provide a starting point with the Stop Error. Interested to see what this is...

**CCT** · July 3rd, 2009, 11:39 AM

Couldn't that situation occur if the drive was Sata running as IDE or AHCI and the Bios wasn't set correctly?

**xpuser357** · July 3rd, 2009, 12:40 PM

Originally Posted by CCT

Couldn't that situation occur if the drive was Sata running as IDE or AHCI and the Bios wasn't set correctly?

Not trying to upset you in any way CCT. Can you have Sata and IDE at the same time on a laptop??. I have seen it on Desk top Foxconn motherboard
where you had both options. but on a little itty bitty motherboard

**geoscomp** · July 3rd, 2009, 12:53 PM

It is relatively normal to have an ide or ahci drive mode on a sata controller regardless of the motherboard. It isnt a different controller or connector, but rather a bios setting for the sata controller

**CCT** · July 3rd, 2009, 01:50 PM

Originally Posted by xpuser357

Not trying to upset you in any way CCT. Can you have Sata and IDE at the same time on a laptop??. I have seen it on Desk top Foxconn motherboard
where you had both options. but on a little itty bitty motherboard

The point I was making refers to the use of Sata drives in either IDE or AHCI mode - http://www.google.ca/search?complete...de+modes&meta=

Perhaps I expressed myself poorly.

**NooNoo** · July 3rd, 2009, 05:26 PM

Now we wait to hear from Niclo

**Niclo Iste** · July 3rd, 2009, 07:07 PM

Sorry I pulled a late night and passed out before I could post. Then had an early morning full of work. I used a vista disk and did a repair on the mbr. That seemed to fix the problem but I think there was more to it than just that. I think the board or the ram is bad but it passed testing. The reason I say such is that it took me 45 minutes to just access the menu to do repair, another 1 and a half hours to let it complete the repair and another 2+ hours for an error check to complete on the drive. Thank you all on your effort I just couldn't stay awake long enough to see the results.

**NooNoo** · July 4th, 2009, 05:53 AM

Sounds like the hard drive is slow or bad or both... use mhdd to scan the drive.

**ADS_Tech** · July 14th, 2009, 08:50 AM

Originally Posted by maced

Noo Noo was poking in the right direction ...

So its all been guess work so far then Noo Noo?.

**NooNoo** · July 14th, 2009, 09:18 AM

Originally Posted by ADS_Tech

So its all been guess work so far then Noo Noo?.

Educated guesswork is the computer technicians stock in trade...let's face it, the complexity and interoperability issues means you get one symptom with several causes.... intuition also helps