HD in hiding.

[dawg]

The Hard Drive in my Thinkpad R61i has gone missing. I boot, get a windows startup screen then a BSD. Always the same in all safe modes too.

If I boot of an old Winternals cd there is no HD there, and booting from Hirens is the same: no HD.
However booting from The Ultimate Boot Disk shows a 120Gb HD, and the Drive Fitness Test gives it 0x00, which is all clear I think.
Suggestions please?

[Paul Komski]

If Windows is giving you a blue screen the Hard Drive is obviously there. I imagine that you need to restore or reinstall Windows but just what to do next depends on whether you need to backup any data beforehand and what restore or installation methods are open to you.

[Sylvander]

Probably the reason the various OS's->program on the bootable CD's cannot see the HDD [while others can] is...
The HDD is either SATA, or is on a SCSI controller card...
So that a driver needs to be available to the loaded OS.
Usually that driver would be made available on a floppy disk...
Or else it would need to be included on the CD.

e.g. With some bootable CD's [like UBCD4Win], I need to supply a driver [on the floppy][my HDD is on a PCI to IDE SCSI RAID controller card], but with others [Puppy Linux] there is no need.
Indeed, some [normally functioning] Puppy Linux versions cannot see my HDD because they don't include the necessary driver in the particular kernel version used.

[Paul Komski]

The HDD is either SATA, or is on a SCSI controller card...
So that a driver needs to be available to the loaded OS.

It's a SATA drive on a Laptop but driver support is only part of the issue of what gets "seen". In the first place the need for such driver support assumes that the BIOS is using RAID/SCSI or ACHI-based SATA. In a BIOS so configured many Linux Kernels and the NT based versions of Windows (such as Vista/XP) need the drivers to "see" the drive because they poll the hardware for themselves. DOS based OSes/utilities do not poll the hardware in this way and should see any SATA/SCSI/RAID (configured in hardware) seen in the BIOS set-up even if some such DOS based stuff could have drive size limitations and so forth. That for example is why BiNG "sees" most any hard drives or hardware arrays (without breaking them); it believes what the BIOS tells it - those that poll for themselves only use the BIOS to select a boot device.

[dawg]

Thanks guys. Bit out of my depth here but going to wing it with BiNG, repartition, reinstall etc.
I have off system backup of everything so hey, dive in.

[Paul Komski]

repartition, reinstall etc

Be aware that the SATA drivers may or may not need to be provided on a floppy drive (using the F6 option at the start of setup) if they are not included as integral to whichever installation CD you are using. Restoring an image would be different. If windows setup needs them then setup itself will not "see" the hard drive. I would check your documentation as to the exact steps needed before you commit - especially as you may need a floppy drive to use for the F6 option; (usually a USB floppy drive will be OK for modern laptops).