60 gig harddrive completely gone.

[Seizure]

Harddrive completely gone

Ok. So for a few days before I've noticed that wheN i turn my PC on it sometimes doesn't detect my harddrive. After a restart or two it detects it and boots up normally. THen today I walk home. TUrn on my PC and I get a "System disk error, please insert boot disk". I ran maxtor's powermax software and technically the harddrive is fine. But it's unpartitioned and unformatted. I'm extremely mad right now. Any one can explain to me why My entire 60 gig harddrive decided to just lose it's partition info without my permission?

Maxtor 60 gig 7200 Diamondmax Plus
2 Surge protectors and blackout buster UPS. So i doubt it's power surges.

 

[ssoni223]

I never take chances w/ hard drives.
Better to spend $50 now, than to lose important stuff

When they start acting flaky, it usually doesnt correct itself.
I had a string of drives that all seemed to die after a few months,
and they all overheated, and they all would stop being detected as well.,

I'd get my data off it while you still can

 

[Seizure]

i think you missing the point. My Harddrive isn't even formated no more for some reason. It's like I have a brand new Unformatted, Unpartitioned Harddrive sitting in my pc.

 

[Hossenfeffer]

If you're able to, run a virus scan.

I actually had a similar problem a couple months back. Scared the bajeezus outta me. I opened it up, checked all the cable connections, cleared the CMOS and went into the BIOS to reconfigure things.

While it looks like things are blank, they may still be intact.

 

[Seizure]

the thing is. I can't even boot up. I have to use a boot disk to boot up, and it doesn't show my C drive because it thinks it's not formatted.

HOw do you clear the CMOS and what did you reconfigure in the bios?

 

[Texun]

I don't have the answer but I do admire the hell out of the problem. Any chance you might have had a magnet close by? Large stereo speakers, Plasma lamp?

 

[Seizure]

nope nothing of the sorts. I'm not that retarted to place magents and stereo speakers near my baby.

 

[Shaftatplanetquake]

You are familiar with the CMOS battery on your motherboard aren't you? If your not do a search on google.com . What you should do is unplug power going to your power supply, pull out the battery, rub it together between your fingers for a min or so, set it down grab a can of coke, come back and stick it back where it was. Plug back in, and power up pressing the delete key rapidly. You are pressing the delete key rapidly to get into the BIOS. Once your in the BIOS go preferably to IDE HDD detect, or if thats not there IDE Configuration. Set it all on auto and press enter, see if it detects like it should. Then you need to save changes and exit the BIOS. Boot again off that floppy and see if the partition is there by running fdisk. It will ask you if you want to enable large file sizes. Say yes. Then enter the option for display partition information (i think its 4). See if it even sees your hard drive. If it does and it shows up that there is a fat32 partition, your gravy. Pull the disk out and reboot (win98 should come up). If it says no partition defined then that means your disk is showing up but somehow or another the FAT (file allocation table) got erased. In this instance, you have to start all over. If it says NO Fixed Disk Present, then something is wrong with the drive, the way you connected it, or the BIOS.

Good luck and let us know what happens with it.

 

[Seizure]

OIC!!. Yea I did that already. My Harddrive does get detected in the bios correctly but when I continue loading it it's like it's not even formatted because it gives me a "System disk error, please insert boot disk" or whatever error that is. I think my Harddrive seriuosly out of nowhere just decided to unformat intself and lose it's partition info.

 

[WarCon]

A fully functional hard drive wouldn't just chose to write to the boot strap. Something else did most likely. I would guess a virus did that happy little number to your hard drive. There was a new virus out that does this, I forgot the name, heck virus's are multiplying too fast for my liking.

Have you tried the fdisk /mbr yet?

 

[goraj]

Is there any floppy in the floppy drive? I know u must have checked, but just in case

 

[Seizure]

nope nothing from the floppy. And I had an updated version of Nortan Antivirus running the background, with realtime status checking on. I doubt that there was a virus na dif there was it could've done anything without norton intervening. SOOOO damn weird.

 

[hairygit1]

Sorry to butt in, but I had a copy of NAV2001 running, and managed to get the Badtrans virus - fixed, but NAV didn't pick it up - even when I tried to send them a sample, the uploader kept on telling me there was nothing to worry about - 2 days later a link to a fix got sent back.

Try putting your hd in a friend (or bad enemy's) poota as the main drive - you 'can't' (?)(hahahahhehehe) damage someone else's poota just by plugging your HD in temporarily. Just see if it is the HD ( you never know ). You might not be able to boot up fully, but at least you can see if it gives the same error - or if it ceases bootingup at the same time.

Best of luck,

 

[ZetaEpyon]

Something similar to this happened to me recently, although mine was an IBM 60GXP and it was somewhat my fault. However, I was able to get nearly all of my data back using a utility called GetDataBack. The version I used was for NTFS, but there is also a FAT32 version available if that is what you had on that drive. Using this utility I was able to recover about 53GB out of 55GB that I had on the drive. It is capable of recovering files even after the drive has been formatted, or, as in your case and mine, even after the drive loses it's partition information for whatever reason. I would recommend trying to track down such a utility and getting your critical data, then reinstalling on the drive.

 

[Seizure]

sounds like a good idea Epyon. Oh and I already tried it with a friend's PC. Same error.