I need a second opinion on what I think is a lost hard disk. I have a disk that is not recognized anymore. I booted up on a 98 boot disk and could not even run fdisk. It said that there were no fixed disks present. Also, it still spins up. Just wanted to double check with someone.

Hi MrKWW. Welcome to the forums.

Did you get much of that nasty weather in Cordova yesterday?

A few things you could try -

Download a partition management utility like Ranish (http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/) and put it on a bootable floppy, or download a boot disk like this one (http://www.startdisk.com) that comes with it. It will show if there's a drive there, its capacity, etc. even if the mbr got fubar'd.

Maybe you could try the lifeline tools (http://support.wdc.com/download/#dlgtools) from Western Digital. They'll tell you more about a WD drive, but they don't ignore a drive if it's not WD.

Have you tried auto-detecting it with your BIOS setup? That option requires no software you don't have already. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

If nothing will detect it, check the power and data cables going into it and any other IDE device that's on the same channel.

Good luck!

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Some mistakes are too much fun to make only once.

Before you pronounce the drive DOA.
Download the diagnostics program from the Drive manufactures web site.

It’s a good way to be sure

Thank you for replies. I will try this.