Matir thanks but that has already been discussed:
--Abid Kazmi

How is it possible that a hdd that is recognized by BIOS but not by any other program?

So that would rule out that there is something physically wrong with the hdd (which includes electrical charge).

--Abid Kazmi

I've seen several hard drives that the bios recognized, but you couldn't do anything else with. the best thing is just the boot floppy image you can download from the hard drive manufacturer. It will tell you if you drive is bad.
I've had a hard drive where the platters would stick to the heads. The bios would recognize it, but it wouldn't spin up. I had to spin it really hard in my hand to make the platters move, then put it back in the computer and it would work until it happened again. It's called stiction.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/stiction.html

I've had a few drives from western digital and quantum that went, thunk, thunk, thunk, about 3 times a second forever until you turned it off. the bios would "see" the drive, but it wouldn't do anything.
Anyway, on an ide drive, the controller is on the bottom of the drive. That's what that circuit card is. You can easily have something physically wrong with the moving parts that the circuit card doesn't understand, or the circuit card can be damaged and the the moving parts not.

I think i just had a maxtor 20 gig die today. I put it in a new computer as a second drive for extra space this morning. I fdisked it, and formatted and mounted a filesystem on it this morning. Late this afternoon, i tried to access the drive, and the computer would just hang up for a minute or 2, and tell me it couldn't access the drive. I rebooted and saw the bios didn't detect the drive. I didn't really care, but it was messing up the first drive too. The case was behind another computer, and had been running at full load all day. It was super hot. I opened the case and the hard drives were really hot. After they cooled off while i added 2 fans to the case, i booted the machine, and the 20 gig maxtor would detect, but i couldn't access it. Like yours. Bios detects, but the computer cannot read or write anything to the drive.
With the 2 new fans, the computer is running almost 20 degrees cooler at full load. 131 down to 112.

Whansard:
I did try the MaxBlast 3 CD that came with the HDD and another one which I downloaded off their website. Both did not display the HDD.

I have a Maxtor 30gig 7200rpm (the current one). Anyways, I know what you are talking about with the repititious clunking noises. The BIOS does detect it but those are always near death. In my school, if they are found, I just put them in storage just in case some experiments are needed to be done.

I am very well aware of the integrated circuit and there has never been any damage to it. If taken out from the system, it was always held from the side and placed on an anti-static bags.

Ok, so it was working fine that morning.

AND:
So it was a cooling problem for you yet you still can't access the drive. Maybe something melted? And when you say it went down from 131 to 112, do you mean celsius or fahrenheit? The most highest my hdd had gotten was 47C at full load.

--Abid Kazmi

F degrees not C degrees.
just for reference:

http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

http://support.wdc.com/download/downloadxml.asp

http://www.fcpa.com/support/hard-dri...tml#diagnostic

http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/

The first link should be helpful and will try later. The rest are wdc, fujitsu, and seagate hard drives.

--Abid Kazmi

OK, finally tried out the other Max software. It does not detect it nor can it do anything. Any suggestions or similar topics that can be found aside from this thread?

Thanks,

--Abid Kazmi