I am curious about how you know there is an HDD failure. Mine didn't fail(knowck on wood), but I have been searching high and low for a drive in the 4G range. A friend had a 3.5G which makes me somewhat happy, but he said he couldn't get it to work for him, and I was welcome to try.
The drive is a Maxtor 83500D4. I stuck the drive in my machine as a slave and it wouldn't boot at all. So I took out my running drive and tried to boot it as master...no luck there either. I tried booting csel, with no luck. I went to Maxtor's website and found drive on it with some troubleshooting tips. d/l'd MaxBlasterPlus HDD Installer and PowerMaxDiagnotsics and tried to detect the drive with it...no luck. It DOES spin up when power is applied(makes a few clicking noises too). I tried to set up drive manually in BIOS...plugged in CHS info and it said it was 1.3G. This machine is a little old...P75(running at 90MHz)AcerAcros with V30 mob. I'm positive that i have all the cables correct, and even did all of this with my old Maxtor 853MB drive...worked perfectly! Does anyone know anything else to try with this drive before it finds it's way to file13? There is absolutely nothing wrong with the machine at all. I was running the max853 and WD1G at the same time on the same IDE cable, with no problems. If its trashed, then it was free...but if it will work, then I would have the last component I need for my "perfect" machine...a suitable sized HDD.
BTW, I did notice something funny that I'm not quite sure about...this drive is Ultra DMA 33 and has S.M.A.R.T. capability. I'm not sure if that will make a difference, but isn't it supposed to be compatible with older machines? The computer box was assembled at Acer in '94 and the HDD in question was made in August '97. If my new mob would ever get here from MicrosourceUSA, then I would have a newer machine to test it in, but the other machines I have are older(compaq presario cds 850 and powerspec cyrix166). I hope this can be salvaged as usable, and if it does Pete, I will send you all of my other HDD's for free! heheh http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

TIA for any help that can be offered.

P.S. I know this isn't the right place for this, but has anyone else ever ordered from microsourceusa.com? they confirmed my order the next day, and haven't confirmed shipment yet....now 9 days later. I already got the memory from crucial, and the 200MMX cpu from CSO, but they still haven't responded to me. I even sent them an e-mail this monday. I think tomorrow I will call them on the phone....the old-fasioned way.

I'm afraid it sounds like the drive is dead. If BIOS, fdisk, and the Maxtor utility all can't see it, I think it's seen its better days. The clicking sound, if fairly loud, would confirm it. Most drives do make a quiet zippng sound as the head moves to find data, but a loud clicking is a bad sign.

Since it works with another drive, I wouldn't think the cable is bad, but you can try a different cable just to be sure. You can try it in one of the older machines, even if it sees the drive as smaller than it actually is, if it will see and use the drive, you would know it's not completely gone.

Bottom line? I think you can use it for target practice, paperweight or bookend. I have a box here with about 7 or 8 in it that are almost duplicates of this post. Someday I'll throw them out, none will work on any board I've tried from 386 to P-200. Including boards with ISA controller cards...

------------------
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)