I have a hard disk belonging to a friend which has apparently gone to the great Fry's in the sky. It cannot be detected by the BIOS IDE detection routine in either of two different machines (one white-box, one Dell). Tried both master and slave on both primary and secondary IDE channels. Also tried manually entering the drive parameters (skipping autodetection) but it fails the initialization on a hard boot. Doing this will also cause any other IDE devices to fail--though they come back to life if I pull the data cable from the problem drive.

I think that if I could just get the hardware recognized, I could recover my friend's data. But I can't get past that point, and I'm not willing (right now) to shell out cash on her behalf for a professional data recovery service.

The drive is a Samsung model SV2044D 20GB, apparently (from the label) manufactured in May of 2000.

Any suggestions?

This may be a stupid question, but it's the kind of thing that's sometimes easily overlooked....have you made sure all of the connector pins are straight?

Ive done that before almost took back the drive until I discovered the thing had no juice I also found this it may help its a free demo http://www.highergroundsoftware.com/
good luck

Originally posted by ryguy
Ive done that before almost took back the drive until I discovered the thing had no juice Yes, important stupid question #2. Did you plug both the data AND power connections in (done that one before :rolleyes: )

Suggestion #3. Have you tried not only changing master/slave jumper on the drive, but the drive order on the channel? I've noticed some drives are picky about where they are attached on the ribbon, especially when there's a second drive on the channel.

You could always try putting it in a HD copier, then copying the contents to a good one....

there may also be a conflict with the drives if they both have OS installed on them