I would just like to try and diagnose a problem I've had today before I go buying a new hard drive. I had a power cut this afternoon, but I turned my PC on again and reloaded football manager and everything was working fine still. I then left the room for about half an hour, when I returned the PC had gone into sleep mode, so I hit space bar and the computer whirred into life again, except my monitor wasn't displaying any picture. It has done this before with my old 8800gt and now with my radeon 5770, and usually just requires a reboot. However when I rebooted this time it took ages to boot and never got to Windows, it instead got to a screen saying "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key". Rebooted and entered the BIOS and SATA 1 doesn't seem to be registering anything connected. Has my drive finally given up then? I've had it three years.
Steps to take : Change sata Cable assuming its a sata drive. Reset Bios to factory settings. Check power cable is ok and drive is powering up. Run Seatools.
Okay I'll get on this tomorrow. How do I check the power cable is okay and if the drive is broke surely it wouldn't power up? It was making a few clicking noises in the past whereas now it seems totally silent. And what is Seatools? Also, from your opinion would you say it is most likely the harddrive or could it be a Mobo issue?
Hard drives DO click..however, if it was click click click click click then chances are its well and truely goosed. Seatools is a diagnostic tool for hard drives, will tell you if somethings wrong with it. If the drive has power, simply put your hand on it and see if you can feel it spin up, if it isnt spinning up then its either theres something wrong with the power supply, or the drive is goosed (probably more the drive is goosed tbh).
To see if its the motherboard, quickly plug the drive into a different sata port. However you said its totally silent, it could be the drive has died and isnt powering up, hence it not being detected in the BIOS.
Okay thanks, I doubt I can use Seatools though because I cannot boot to Windows (to install and run it)? Or am i missing something here?
You can burn it to a bootable CD from another computer, and boot into CD from the BIOS. However, you need to get your drive detected in the bios or seatools wont see it either. Chances are your drive is dead buddy.
Thanks for your help mate. Gonna check for power tomorrow but as you can see from one of the pics the drive doesn't appear on the BIOS under Sata 1 like it should. I'm not that bothered if the drive is dead I didn't have anything important on there except my just-turning-epic football manager game! I just didnt want to spend £40 to find out its something else. I'll get back to you tomorrow and let you know if it was just the drive (just in case you were interested). Any recommendations for a new drive from Scan btw? The drive that looks like its just packed in was a Samsung Spinpoint 500GB I think, may opt for the 1TB version of that drive although I doubt I'll ever fill it, unless I put all my music on max quality and install every game, but its lasted me three years roughly so I should be in good stead if I got another.
Let me know how you get on dude. And if you dont want to spend a lot but want decent performance the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB is the drive to get. Dont worry about not filling it up, the price/performance on it is excellent. And if you need help with anything PC related im only down the road in Preston .
Acronis Drive Monitor - its free! Stick this disk in a caddy and usb it to a machine with Acronis on. It will tell you if its health etc and the state of it. If it doesn't work in the caddy its dead mate. Catherine
I know people dont usallly post to say there drive is great but i seen to see a lot of dead /faulty samsung drives about. I've used wd drives for years and never had one die on me, just a thought.
Samsung drives have also been very popular in recent years because of the F1 and F3 Spinpoint models, hence more people using them, hence more people reporting failures. I doubt it's significantly more (or less) than other manufacturers. Aside from Maxtor, of course, which have always been absolutely horrendous for failures. As for the OP - If it wasn't for the drive not showing in the BIOS I'd say that it could just be a screwed up MBR or Partition Table. If you can get it showing in the BIOS and it still doesn't work then download a Linux Live CD such as Ubuntu and boot into that to check if your presumed-faulty drive can be mounted and accessed. If it can and the data's intact, then it's probably just the MBR that's been wiped/corrupted somehow; which can be fixed with your operating system CD. If the drive can be seen by the Linux live CD, but its partitions are inaccessible, then the partition table may have been damaged somehow. The data would still be mostly intact, but would require recovery via an app that can read raw data off the disk, such as EaseUS recovery. If Linux can't even see the drive, then it's probably a hardware fault. Since it's a Spinpoint it should probably make a loud 'Woop' noise when it first powers up. Try switching some cables and ports around to see if you get a result. Different SATA port, different power cable, etc.
yeah you could try and restore the mbr if linux sees it also (fdisk -l) this even works for windows vista/7 Code: sudo dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sda sync
As a last resort, if there is data on there you want to backup, try putting the hdd in an antistatic bag, then in a ziploc bag and stick it in the freezer for a bit. Sounds medieval but it's worked for me in the past.
^ that might work but only to quickly recover data http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html
Alright guys, late reply but I've ordered a new HDD. Tried different cables, different sata connections, it never registered in the BIOS. I unplugged the drive and used a spare from my older PC, with the same cable and in SATA 1, and it registered on the BIOS. So it must have been the drive. Ordered the Samsung Spinpoint 1TB from Scan for £44ish, not sure whether it was the F1 or F3which someone mentioned, but if I can get another 3 years from a drive I'll be happy, besides hopefully SSD drives will have dropped significantly in price by then.
