HDD Failure

Caviar Balck HDD as they are supposed to be more relibale than 'Blue or Green' variants.

worth trying to recover the user data ... my docs/ pics / emails.

replacment, no assistance with data recovery.

Your data's gone.

NT

Why not try a Linux live cd? like Knoppix

If it's an electronics failure - buy another one and swap the board. Desperate measure, I know.

You think the board is shorted and causing the defect? That happened to me. Nasty if you don't realise what is happening.

Different SATA cable or the same one? (there's a possibility of a bad cable, but two would seem rather unlikely)

Check for a damaged drive connector, too - there might not be anything you can do about it personally, but if there's obvious damage at least you know that someone should be able to sort it out for you.

Caviar Balck HDD as they are supposed to be more relibale than 'Blue or Green' variants.

worth trying to recover the user data ... my docs/ pics / emails.

replacment, no assistance with data recovery.

Try HDD in another PC in case motherboard is buggered.

Try another data and power cable

Try freezing the HDD for a few hours in a sealed plastic bag with the leads poking out.

Buy another 'identical' hard drive, swap the drive circuit boards. Boot a live linux CD and see if the drive can be seen.

If it still can't be seen then accept that if you don't pay huge wodges of money to a professional data recovery company you won't be able to get the data back.

I had a zero ohm link that lost the magic smoke - replaced it with another one, the HDD is still runing fine 6 months later, not really worth buggering about getting it replaced

And, yes - always buying hard drives in pairs has saved my data twice in recent times

Caviar Balck HDD as they are supposed to be more relibale than 'Blue or Green' variants.

worth trying to recover the user data ... my docs/ pics / emails.

replacment, no assistance with data recovery.

Only time this worked for me was when we replaced the electronics and got the data back - or most of it - when the electronics was duff. But that was in a company with a LOT of similar disks.

What can I say? the FIRST thing I do with a new disk is back it up..

A mate of mine had a drive which wasn't detected (PATA though). I suggested he power down and off, unplug the ribbon, re-boot, power down and off, connect the ribbon, re-boot. Worked for him.

In case you need all that empty space back? ;)

It would be more useful to set up a backup strategy.

Chris

Yes this sounds like a logic failure to me. Brian

Er that's how you back it up.

Having a strategy is totally useless if you dont actually implement it,.

Surely you will change the onboard bad sector mapping?

Isn't the bad sector mapping on the disk itself? I know it used to be.

Now it is. But way-back-when drives used to come with a printed defect list you were expected to enter into your O/S, or you could leave the O/S running a "comprehensive surface analysis" for a few days before before making use of the drive.

Caviar Balck HDD as they are supposed to be more relibale than 'Blue or Green' variants.

Is it detected in the bios? If it is try a Linux CD as others have suggested.

As an aside, just had an issue with Windows 8 being stupid and suddenly deciding that it couldn't detect one of my perfectly good drives, which could be seen in the bios and by Linux. Long story but turns out that Windows 8 suddenly wasn't happy with the partition table flags, but it had been for several days prior to that point...

Andy Burns spake thus:

Not quite correct. You entered the defect list when running a low-level format, typically by executing code on the drive controller. The relevant sectors were then marked as unusable on the drive, and would survive high- level formats.

Some OSes insisted on this.