Total Hardrive failure! please help.

[Ewen]

Hi,

Last night i was sitting on my pc, typing away at something and suddenly my computer reboot itself.
when it came back up, everything looked alright, until i realized that my second hardrive a 12.something gig slave, was no longer detected - it now says "D: (removable drive)" and if i try to access it, it says its not formated and if i try to format it, it gives me a megabyte listing of something like 60,000 megabytes, when i try to format it says that that i don't have enough memory to preform the format! what is going on?! i just bought the hardrive a couple months ago, and i only used it for storage, i scanned everything for viruses and there was nothing.

Please help, thanks,
Tanner McCuin

[CMonster]

Double and triple check the cable connections to all the drives;

Was there any special software such as "Easy Drive" used to install this drive?

How does your Device Manager look? Any yellow exclaimation marks? disks?.. disk controlers?

You might also want to follow fishboy's advice and see if you can access the drive by using a boot disk and from there run scandisk - also you can try going into the Device Manager /Performance tab /File System/ Trouble Shooting - and "Disable all 32 bit protect-mode disk drivers," (don't forget to set it back again later) then your system will reboot and you may be able to access the drive that way to run scandisk, fdisk/format or whatever you want - if the problesm continue it might be easiest to just exchange the drive for another one..


One more thing, is your primary hard drive almost full?


[This message has been edited by CMonster (edited 07-29-99).]

[fishboy]

mmmm. Can you access the drive through DOS? Try to run a disk repair utility on it and see if you get any bad blocks or such. Try formatting using the disk configuration disk that came with the drive.

[ufo]

do a scandisk on it (if it will allow you) then if it checks drop to a dos window and type FDISK this will bring up your hd partitions and stuff. change to your 2nd hd and see if its 100% usage. also scan for virus's and if nothing I can only sugest what the last guy said.. check cables if they are alright Try replugging them in I find that sometimes this fixes problems I dont know why but it does

[SoopaStar]

Here is my recomenadtion.
try unpluggin your primary drive, set your 'dead' drive as master. boot with a floppy disk and see if you can access the drive. if you can do that, then you at least know that your harddrive is okay. Next I would double and tripple check the cables goign to each of the drives. Also, check to see that the cable is connected securely to the motherboard. Do you have more than one IDE channel on the board? If you have the two harddrives on your primary and a CD rom on your secondary, try puttin your #1 HD on the primary and your CD on the primary then put the #2 'dead' HD on the seconday as master on there. You could also try getting a new cable for it.
Try booting into safe mode windows (at the startup, press the F8 key until it brings up a menu and choose Safe Mode). then goto the control panel-->system properties and see if you have multiple IDE Controllers or dupplicate harddrives listed. You can also check under the Performance to see if any of the drivers are running in MS-DOS compatibility mode and try to correct that.

SS