Allo all.

I'm wondering if there's any chance that I could save my HDD?

Every once in a while, the secondary IDE controller would die in the middle of playing an online game, or in the middle of browsing a web page, or whatever, in Windows 2000. This time, it died while I was formatting the HDD that was under it (Secondary Slave, Maxtor drive, 20GB). I'm sure it was the controller b/c every time the second HDD died, the cd rom did too. The dialogue box was the regular so-and-so was ejected, etc.

A little tech spec:
Primary Master: Big Ole Maxtor 120GB, Windows 2000
Secondary Master: (Now defunct) Maxtor 20GB, (wiped Solaris to make room for Mandrake 10)
Secondary Slave: CD ROM

Something interesting:
Setting SM to [Auto] and SS to [Auto] detect in BIOS meant that neither HDD or CD were detected in Windows. (CD detected in BIOS occasionally, but name was garbled: LITE-ON DVD..., became L!TE~WN-DVD etc.)
Setting SM to [None] and SS to [Auto] detect in BIOS meant that the CD was detected in Windows. (CD detected in BIOS, and name was just fine)

That led me to believe that the HDD itself was a problem, and was causing the whole channel to not be detected properly.

What I've done:
Format: Couldn't be run b/c the drive was not located.

Ranish:
Installed on a boot floppy. Identified HDD just fine when installing Solaris. Now though, it doesn't recognize the drive (F5 next disk, does nothing). So, Primary HDD (Win) was detected, and defunct HDD was not. Removed Primary HDD, swapped defunct HDD into Primary Master position. Enabling [Auto] detect in BIOS, Ranish had a weird error, "Error getting hard disk parameters." The Ranish program then wouldn't open it's main program.

Kill Disk:
Installed on disk (thus making me really nervous). I can't remember the error, but it was similar to a HDD not recognized.

Maxtor MaxBlast:
Burned the ISO bootable to a CDROM. This is the program supplied by the manufacturer to install, configure, and reformat its HDDs. The program booted just fine. HDD was not detected (...by...its own manufacturer...v.v), so all combinations of commands to fix the HDD were to no avail.

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Sorry for the long post, and thanks in advance if there's anyone out there that can help.

Is there some obscure program out there that can save my HDD?

Sean

First off, and most importantly, you need to learn a basic principle of computer hardware troubleshooting--strip off stuff to the bare minimums, and add as little at a time as possible to determine what's wrong.

For example, it seems that either your CD-Rom could be causing the problem, or your hard drive, or your IDE channel, or the IDE controller itself, or it could be a bad cable. You can't tell which because you haven't even tried to remove any of your hardware.

So, the first thing to do is remove all hard drives and optical drives. See if everything in the BIOS looks normal (it should).

Next, attach ONLY the CD-ROM to the primary IDE channel. See if the name appears normal in the BIOS, and if so, see if you can boot up a liveCD with it. (Some linux bootable CDs seem to be rather sensitive to flakey CD drives, in my experience.)

After that, attach ONLY the problematic hard drive to the primary IDE channel. See if it looks normal in the BIOS.

If everything checks out so far, try attaching both the problem hard drive and the CD-ROM to the primary IDE channel. See if they look normal in the bios. If so, boot up a liveCD, and see if you can format the problem hard drive (i.e. with QTParted).

By doing some swapping around of hardware, you should be able to figure out exactly which piece of hardware is causing the problems. It might just be a bad IDE cable. Right now, you're really just guessing.

After you figure out what piece of hardware is messed up, then you can go about discarding/replacing/fixing it.

Note that I assume you have a liveCD around (like Knoppix). This is a REALLY GOOD THING to have around. Windows tools are, I find, more hit-and-miss in their helpfulness compared to a fully operational Linux operating system.

Thank you for the advice of starting small and testing each device individually. I've downloaded and am about to burn Knoppix. I will let you all know the results of each BIOS setting.

Sean

Wow. I had NO IDEA what Knoppix was capable of. I'm running an OS w/o a hard drive and I have a no-questions-asked access to the internet. Thank you for recommending it.

0. With no drives hooked up to the computer, BIOS looked very uninteresting - nothing detected. Exiting BIOS led to the last bootable option - no bootable floppy in A:, insert etc.

1. With just the HDD hooked up, BIOS still looked uninteresting. The autodetect failed to find a HDD. Exiting BIOS again led to the last bootable option - no nootable floppy in A:, insert etc.

2. With just the CDROM hookedup, BIOS reported the drive name correctly. Exiting BIOS, the CD started, Knoppix came to the knoppix command prompt, and I shut off the computer.

3. Now with both HDD and CDROM, BIOS reported no HDD detected, but the CDROM was reported just fine. I exited the BIOS and let Knoppix run fully (glad I did, this is awesome).

This is a much cleaner way of troubleshooting than I'm used to, and it did take less time to carry out all the steps.

What does this all mean?

Sean

Well, it means that almost certainly your CD drive is good. My experience is that if a CD drive is flakey, it may not be able to boot up Knoppix at all, or at least there will be some read failures sooner than later.

The hard drive? It's probably hopeless. One last hope is that Linux doesn't actually use the BIOS for hard drive access, so it's theoretically possible that you might be able to access the hard drive from Linux (including Knoppix). With the CD drive and 20gig drive hooked up, boot up Knoppix. Under the System menu (I think) is a program called "QTParted". It's a graphical partition manager--more or less a clone of Partition Magic. The left frame is a list of connected hard drive devices it detects. If it sees your hard drive, then maybe you're in luck. Otherwise, I think it's utterly hopeless.

Well, at least it was that modest 20gig drive that got damaged, and not the 120gig.

Yeah, you're right. I'm glad it wasn't the 120G HDD. I now have a 20GB coaster, according to QTParted.

Thanks again for your help, and hey, at least I have a bootable Linux CD now

There is some advice I do not notice in the posts to this thread.

Download and run the manufacturers utility program to check your hard drive.
The Ultimate Boot CD has most of them and more on it.

I have these............the maxtor and IBM sites offer utilities that fit on a floppy and will check the hard disk for IO read/write errors and other parameters and will fix, if possible bad sectors....