Recovering a dead hard disk

[Andrew]

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?

[Ghoulish Delight]

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?

[ryguy]

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

[Ghoulish Delight]

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 )

[Ghoulish Delight]

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.

[DisneyFan25863]

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

[ryguy]

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