HD not working

[dabie]

Hi my name is Debbie and I am new here so I hope I do this right!
I have a 20 gb. HD from seagate it won't work and I have data I need off of it. I tried freezing it (I read that here) but still no go. It's on a computer runnint xp
it also says something about "raw" I don't know what that is....is there ANY hope thanks....I love your site.
Debbie

[cmptrgydv]

what do you mean by not working?
what does it do or say?

[mr smith]

Raw, normally means, new/unused and ready to format, what are you doing to try to acces it

[Atomic Rooster]

Go HERE and download the SeaTools Desktop version. It will creat a bootable floppy that will test your HDD.

[dabie]

when the computer comes on it says "disk error" nothing else comes up. I tried going into the bios. I did put the hd on another computer and it did the same thing.
debbie

[cmptrgydv]

do you have jumpers set right master, slave,

[taz480]

Quote:

Originally Posted by mr smith

Raw, normally means, new/unused and ready to format, what are you doing to try to acces it

Mr Smith is mostly right, but it goes a little deeper than that. "raw" actually means that the hard drive is in a completely empty state with no partitions whatsoever. A hard drive will be in that state when it is out of the factory brand new(never had partitions) or if you delete all partitions using FDISK or similar partitioning software.
What exactly are you looking at when you see something that says "raw"? Are you using FDISK? Your WindowsXP disc's setup program?
If you believe to have data on it, I assume that it has been partitioned and formatted at one time. If you see something that says it is "raw" then I'm afraid you've done something to wipe it clean. You either reformatted the existing partition thus erasing the data or you deleted the partition altogether having the same effect. If it says "raw" then you had to have deleted the partition. Otherwise where you are seeing "raw", it would say something else like "Unpartitioned Space- 20000MB".
You can try putting the HD in another PC as a slave(be sure to move jumpers) and see if the data is there that way. MAKE SURE the computer you put it in is running on the same file system as your HD. If you were on XP it was probably NTFS. Find another XP machine. It will show up as "Local Drive (F)" or something.
I still think you wiped your drive, tho, if it says "raw".

Or the drive is bad and just won't show the partition.

On a personal note, I was thinking about replacing my 40Gig Samsung cuz it's been reformatted so many times it's about done. I bought a 40Gig Seagate from Walmart out of haste. I found out very quickly that the only good thing about Seagates is that they do have some pretty cool software utilities. That's it. I wouldn't buy a Seagate if my life depended on it. That, of course, is just my opinion. I really like Maxtor and Western Digital. My Samsung is just what came with my Pavilion but has held up pretty dam good considering how hard I've hashed on it. I've done everything to it short of throwing it across the room.
If it is toast and you're gonna have to buy a new one, go buy like a 80 or 120 Gig Western Digital. You won't be sorry.

[nopostage]

I ran into the same problem recently, so went out and bought a new hard drive, and replaced the broken drive with the new one. Then I reinstalled winXP on the new drive. Then I installed the dead drive into the same computer leaving the new one intact, and pulled the jumper out with tweezers and put it back on in the "slave" position so that it would become my D: drive. When I booted XP back up, I was able to see that I now had a C and a D drive. If you cannot see the D: drive in windows explorer (MY COMPUTER) then you may not have installed the drive correctly or the motor is dead. In that case you might have to have the drive sent out to have your files recovered- very expensive. In my case I was able to see the D: drive in MY COMPUTER, but was not able to see any files on the dead drive. I double clicked on the D: drive but Windows paused for a few moments and then an error came back saying it failed. So I downloaded and installed a trial version of File Scavenger and scanned the d: drive and it found my files. It gave the option of finding specifc files like .doc, or .xls or all files (*.*). The trial version, however, did not let me recover the files, but at least I knew that the software was able to see my files on the dead drive so I bought the full version and recovered only the files I needed. If you try to recover all the files it takes a long time. You really don't need all the files anyway. After I recovered all my files I tried to format the dead drive, but it didn't work so I through out the old drive.

[dabie]

thank you all sooo much. I have recovered my data!!! I couldn't of done it without your help thanks again....I love this forum
debbie