Hard drive Is BEEPING and won't show up in my computer

[Mongoo]

My computer was fine for over a year and then all of a sudden my cd-burner and 2nd hardrive dissapeared in my computer. On top of that the computer would beap when I booted up.

Now I took the hard drive out and rehooked the dvd player via IDE (the way I got the Computer). the CD-burner shows up in my computer. I get a external encloser for the 2nd hardrive and hook it up via usb/firewire. When I turn the power on for the hardrive it beeps, almost the same if not the same beeps as when I thought my computer was beeping. The External hardrive does not show up in my computer even after windows apears to have detected it and load the driver.

The Beep is like 2 long beeps and then 7 short ones. Acutally it might just be 9 short beeps. Its to quick to really be sure of the number.


Please help. I need to get to the contents of that hard drive. Its got some original music of mine recorded on it that would be irreplacable.

The Hardrive is a MATROX 120GB

Thank you

Mongoo

 

[LeetestUnleet]

What's the BIOS manufacturer? I can tell you what the beepcode means if you tell me who the BIOS manufacturer is.

 

[Mongoo]

I don't know for sure, but the maker of the encloser is called "Miro U Plus".

Hope that helps.

It's a Matrox hard drive too.

 

[LeetestUnleet]

Hm, I meant the motherboard's BIOS manufacturer, but okay. I reread the post and you said that the beeps are coming from the hard drive itself? Have you tried connecting the hard drive to another computer and see if it does the same thing?

 

[Mongoo]

I've tryed hooking it up to a win98 and winxp and so far no luck. I just don't get it.

 

[LeetestUnleet]

Methinks the drive be dead. As far as salvaging the data... Hrm... well, if the computer isn't even recognizing the drive, that could pose a problem. I don't know how you could go about salvaging it yourself w/o sending it to a forensics company (but they'll charge ya), but here's a *bump* in hopes that someone else has a better idea.

 

[Dennis Travis]

All I can say is just a few months back I had a Video Editing friend of mine tell me his Maxtor 120 or 160 Gig (Forget which now) was beeping and would not work. The drive was clearly bad and the beeping was from the drive itself. Never ran into that before with an IDE drive. Had an Quantum SCSI that had beep codes but never with an IDE. The dood lost all his videos he was working on for his company. I told him to call a data restore center but not sure if he ever did.

 

[oldman420]

It sounds like your going to lose that drive sir.try spinrite at grc.com that may just do it.
and never trust a hdd again with irreplaceable stuff, keep that on cd or some other media,sorry your having problems

 

[mortoma]

I had a similar situation where I had a Western Digital HDD that took a surge/spike of some kind. Neither the Bios nor the OS would even detect the drive. But for $70.00, I downloaded a program called "Getdataback" and installed it in Win98. I made the bad drive a slave configuration with the jumpers and hooked it up on the same cable as my Win98 boot drive.

The program, although not self-explanatory or user friendly, was able to not only see the drive but recover the entire thing ( with about 2,000 MP3s on it ! ) I didn't even lose on single 1 or 0 of data, everything was recovered perfectly. And I have no idea how the software was able to detect the drive but it did. This near disaster was averted by Getdataback. I had no other copies of those Mp3s and it took me literally years to download them!!! You do have to purchase separate programs for NTFS file system or FAT32. So you have to know what the file system is before you spend the $70.00 bucks. I now have those Mp3s burned to DVD media, just to be on the safe side. As a matter of fact I purchased my DVD burner just for that alone.

If you want to risk paying for a 70 buck program, do a google search for Getdataback. Alternately you could hire a professional to do it but that would cost vastly more $$$ of your hard earned money.

 

[mortoma]

Almost forgot, my drive didn't beep so that might be something to think about. A modern HD consists of lots of electronic chips, resistors, capacitors, diodes and motors that drive the platters and the arms which have the magneto read/write heads on them. If something like the motor doesn't work, then even a data recovery program like I used wouldn't work. In this case professional would have to do the job. They can even take out the platters an put them in another drive if they have to. I hope you don't have to hire a pro, since this can cost several hundred dollars.

Forgot to say that in my case, I was able to FDISK and reformat the same drive that went dead and use it again. I use it to this day but not as a boot drive, just an extra slave storage drive. Been working flawlessly for two years now. An electical surge only kills them temporarily. But an electrical breakdown of the parts might kill it permanently, in my case I was lucky.

 

[fractilian]

The Beeping is a diagnostic beep from the hard drive. Alot of people have been having problems with Maxtor drives. The common problem is that one of the readers is getting stuck. The most successful fix seems to be "knocking" on the drive while power is on. If you can loosen things up it will work again. I would them backup all your data and call it in for an RMA if your still covered under warenty. The knocking thing worked for me but others didn't have any luck. Hope this helps.