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Hard Drive Unrecognized

S

SpanishFry

Platinum Member
I have a 160gb Maxtor drive that was a slave in my XP machine. It probably 80% full and has never been a problem. Well, I took it out of the machine about 2 weeks ago and its been sitting on the shelf. I just tried slaving it to the PC again and once the computer starts to load up Windows all I get is a black screen that says "Press Any Key to Reboot". So I took the drive and put it in another computer to see if that helped and on post it says Secondary Drive 0 unrecognized, Press F1 to continue, F2 to enter Setup. I've tried master and slave, checked the jumpers, diffrent IDE channels etc. Did my drive die on the shelf? I'm not so sure it ever spins up, is this a power connection issue? Thanks
 
The only real way to check if it's spinning (if it's not recognised in the BIOS), is to press your ear to it and then turn your PC on. You should hear something coming from the drive. If so, then check the IDE cable, and also that you haven't bent any of the IDE pins on the hard disk.
 
OK, the HD definitely spins up but as far as the PC is concerned it doesn't have any power. It still goes unrecognized in the CMOS. This may seem to be a ridiculous question, but if it is a power issue can I take a working hard drive and basically use it for parts or is it too fragile a component? I know there are all kinds of contamination issues when opening a drive.
 
Pay attention to this bit because it's important:

If you open a hard disk, you will kill it. Do not open it!
Is it still under warranty?
 
That's kind of what I thought about opening it. I haven't investigated the warranty yet, I'm not ready to give up on the data yet. I was in the process of dumping everything from this 160gb drive to my new Raid5 array of 4x250gb drives. If anyone has any suggestions at all PLEASE let me know.
 
Some things to try:

1. Try a new IDE cable.
2. Try a different power cable.
3. Reset the CMOS on your motherboard.
 
MrChad, thanks for the suggestion but I've done all of these. Even used multiple PCs in multiople configs. My newest discovery is that sometimes when holding the drive to my ear on boot I hear a faint "clunk" as if it's getting stuck at some point. Then other times it doesn't seem to move at all. Any new suggestions?
 
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