Existing drive no longer seen by XP but seen in BIOS

[harrillj]

After booting today my PC was running very sluggish. SOmething appeared wrong. So I shut down however, it got hung in a "Windows is Shutting Down" screen for 30 minutes before I was forced to use the power button. Ultimately I did a system retore to the prior day. One of my drives full of critical data is no longer recognized by Windows XP SP1, however, when going into the bios I can see that the bios does see the drive. I do not know if the initial problems trying to boot were related to this drive. However, the drive was recognized by Windows before I had to do a cold power down with the power switch because I was getting files from it this morning.

It is Western Digital 7200 WD2500JB 250 GB drive. I couldn;t fin anytihng on their site and their utilities don't see the drive either.

Please help...!

Thanks

 

[amdskip]

Is the drive seen in disk manager (control panel>administrative tools>computer management>disk management)

 

[harrillj]

No it is not. When I look in Disk Drives in Device Manager it is not there. I only see loading during the bott process and I also see it when I go into the bios,

 

[amdskip]

Try hooking the drive up by itself.

 

[Joshua05]

when you first loaded xp, did you have to load a raid controller? one of your drivers may have been lost in the restore... if you want to make 100% sure that your hard drive is still working, find a friend who will let you slave up your hdd to check it

also you should think back and make an effort to determine why your computer slowed down all the sudden... when windows is up and running hit ctrl alt del to check out your task list.... google the tasks that you don't recognize and deal with any malicious software you find

 

[harrillj]

Things have gone from bad to worse. First, the drive is nowhere, device manger, disk managemnet, even the Western Digital boot CD utility does not recognize it. It does the recognize the other drives I have that are the exact same model EIDE 250GB 7200 Caviar drives.

I also tried it on another PC and get the same problem.

So.. I thought I found something in the WD knowlegdebase that related to their EIDE drive stop being recognized by XP but seen by BIOS after using it for weeks and longer. Sounded like my problem. So ia ran a utility I downloaded and now not only will the PC not boot to the desktop when the drive is attached, but it makes a repetetive clicking sound. The WD tech site said to unplug the cable but leave the power connected and reboot. If the sound is still there with only the power connected, then the drive is shot. If it goes way, then there are 3 or 4 "software/bios" reasons that this could happen, but it doesn't give clear instructions or any for that matter.

WHat a nightmare.