My hard drive came up with "master IDE hard drive not found" and of course that's the one that has my OS.?

Question

The day before that happened my HD made a funny noise, of course I dismissed it and now it does not spin and will not boot beyond bios am I le screwed is there any way that I can copy this drive to another? Will I have to take it appart? or am I totally screwed?

Answer 1

well i really don't suggest you try taking it apart but yes you need a new HDD. you might be able to hook that one up as a secondary but it really doesn't sounds good

Answer 2

Your disk has had a mechanical failure.  Unless you have access to the FBI's forensic labs, you are totally screwed.

Just pop in a new hard drive, reinstall Windows and your apps, and then restore your files from that backup you've been faithfully making every week.

Answer 3

A friend of mine has had success with the following method.  It is a shot in the dark, but it sounds like you have nothing to lose anyway.  

Take out the hard drive, put it in a static-free bag, put that in another plastic zipper bag (a sandwich bag will do).  Put it in the freezer over night. In the morning take it out of the bags (you have to work quickly and carefully), hook the hard drive back into your machine.  *IF* it boots, you will have approximately 15 to 20 minutes to possibly retrieve your most important data before the drive flakes out again.  PLEASE NOTE:  This method will only work about 5% of the time, but if you are down and out and don't have several thousand dollars to send it off to a clean room for data retrieval, then it is worth a shot.  I'll keep my fingers crossed for you. Good Luck!

Answer 4

Reboot then as it starts rebooting, press the delete key. Then using the BIOS menus, go to the section which has your hard drive information and hope like h**l its able to recognize your hard drive again, otherwise you will to use your daily backups you were dutifully making (har har)

Answer 5

well your hard disk has developed bad sectors. unfortunately you cant repair it as it is hardware problem..but fortunately you can minimize it...

try zero filling your hard drive .may be this will work if damage is not much....

Answer 6

hmm, you have bad sectors. if your lucky you can buy a new hard drive for a primary drive, then just pull your old files off of your secondary drive(the screwed one). that is, if the problem is that it just has a problem starting.

good luck.