Any Hope Here?

[acampbell]

My boot drive (NTFS, 2.5", 120G, SATA) suddenly stopped working. I tried to boot, and got the dreaded boot disc failure. I have removed the drive, inserted it into an appropriate SATA external enclosure and plugged it into another computer's USB port. This computer does not show the presence of another drive when the little external drive is turned on.

When the drive is turned on, it whirs up and then down, then up, down, up, down. This happenes about 3 or 4 times, then the drive falls silent.

The working computer says the USB mass storage device is working properly.

Will ZAR help in this case? It's beyond me where to tell ZAR to look for the drive, so I don't have much hope. All ideas, suggestions, anything welcome!

Alice Campbell

[Alexey V. Gubin]

This behavior typically indicates a damage to the drive hardware, something we cannot solve. To confirm:

Start the standard proceudre described at http://www.z-a-recovery.com/unformat-tutorial.htm. If you see the problem drive in the list when you arrive at "Step 3 - Select physical device to recover", then try it. If you do not, then you need a physical repair service.

[guardone]

Forgive my interruption, I tried buying a hard disk last year to run in an external usb enclosure. It was never successsful, and I now believe it was because of power problems. Your hard disk may be broken, but the fact it does not work in the usb enclosure is not conclusive. Try and place it in a similar computer, or even in a desktop with appropriate conversion cables, and run the ZAR again.