Problems with sata hard drive

[hessodreamy]

One of the office pcs died this morning. Turn it on, get the bios start screen, then it goes blank. It has a single sata hard drive, which is recognised in bios.

I put in an ide hard drive from another pc, as master, and booted from that ok. I thought i'd see if I could retrieve data from the sata drive. It's still recognised in the bios, but doesn't show in windows.

So if the sata drive is showing in bios, does that rule out physical failure of the drive? Would I be able to get the drive working again, or at least recover data from it?

Many Thanks

[Wheeler777]

no it does not rule out drive failure, all your drive is giving is the information needed to identify it, but i would definitely try a known good sata cable, and the obvious security of the connections, even better would be to connect it to an existing good system as storage to see if its readable, thats your best bet for recovery before you enter into the realms of data recovery. cya.

W

[hessodreamy]

OK the problem drive does not work in the original pc, either for booting or data. Tried it in another pc and it works fine as a second drive, but not as the boot drive (continually restarts after bios screen, sometimes visits the 'your computer did not shut down properly' black screen).

So what does this point towards? When I found I could access the hard drive as a second drive on another pc, I though maybe problems with the sata bus on the first motherboard, but then it still doesn't boot from the drive.

Confused

[hessodreamy]

Managed for fix it by attaching the problem drive to another pc as a second drive, and running chkdsk.

checkdisc really is very good isn't it? I should try that more in the future.

[Wheeler777]

keep an eye on that drive m8, checkdisk does not check every file on your system,
i recommend you backup your important data now and at regular intervals, your drive may well be fine now, one way to give it a more complete test is to use the manufacturers own drive check utility, they all have them, maxtors is called maxblast, seagate and western digital have thier own, only if it passes thier more stringent tests should you have confidence in it,

best is always to backup though, weve all lost data at some time because of carelessness, nice to hear its working again, cya.

W

[zap]

running "chkdsk drive_letter: /R" will read all data and try to fix, you need to change drive_letter: to the drive letter allocated by the pc to the sata drive

[hessodreamy]

hmmm... it's packed up again. This time chkdsk didn't fix it. I ran the diagnostics from the manufacturer (hitachi) which said that there were no problems.

Does this ultimately direct me to re-installing windows?

[dandnsmith]

I think that what it does point to is a serious need for running system diagnostics - it could be RAM faulty, motherboard fault, seating problem as well as HDD.
Merely re-installing Windows might just be an annoying waste of time.

[hessodreamy]

How do I diagnose that then?

[hessodreamy]

Well I'm super confused now.
To eliminate problems with the rest of the hardware, I swapped in an identical hard drive from another (working perfectly) machine. It got as far as the 'windows did not shut down properly, choose how you want to start up...' and then restarted every time. Which is further than it got previously, but still not great.

So I started looking at the other hardware. The RAM had been replaced a while back, so I swapped it. Lo and behold - booted up fine. Just for fun, I put the old one (which I'd just taken out) back in - and it still booted up fine!

So I've got a working pc in exactly the same configuration as it was yesterday when it wasn't working. Any ideas where to go from here? Apart from cross my fingers?