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Hard Disk Drive Not Found
I have a nearly new Inspiron 2200. Microphone input isn't working
right. Dell chat line representative insists on scheduling technician to replace the motherboard. Unfortunately, the technician leaves two screws loose when replacing the mobo. I have the tech come back to fix this mysterious new buzzing noise. This time, I make the mistake of handing the laptop to the tech while it is still in hibernation mode. I do not realize this is a mistake at the time, but I soon find out. The tech doesn't check the machine's power status; he immediately removes the motherboard while it is still in hibernation. After this, the machine starts acting funky -- primarily freezing during or shortly after bootup. I try some old familiar fixes, like Norton Disk Doctor. Nothing helps. Eventually, I discover it is possible to use the Recover option when booting from the Windows XP program CD. Inside Recover, I run CHKDSK /R instead of CHKDSK /P, which I think might have been the better approach. I run some diagnostics. The Hitachi online rep says the results indicate that the Dell tech basically trashed the hard drive by dismantling the system while it was in hibernation mode. Hitachi gives me an RMA for the drive. But I really don't want to lose data from that drive. My most recent backup is several days old. So I play around a bit more. At this point, the machine is functioning less well. At first, after the catastropic Dell service call, it would boot into WinXP and then slow down or freeze. Now it is sometimes not even recognizing the hard drive on bootup. I look in the BIOS Setup and it says there's no hard drive. I try booting from the CD and I get the same thing, whether booting with the WinXP CD, a Knoppix Linux self-contained CD, or a Hitachi diagnostics CD. The error message I'm getting is this: internal hard disk drive not found No bootable devices -- strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility After the first several boots into WinXP, I am getting this error message more frequently. This decaying performance seems familiar -- it does seem like the behavior of a failing drive. But I'm not sure it adds up. If the Dell tech fried the circuits on the drive, it seems like it would perform at the same level consistently. I am guessing that dismantling a hibernated machine would not do any surface-level damage to a drive, of a type that would yield decaying reliability. I would like to get my data off this hard drive. But the options seem limited. I don't know how to configure Knoppix to use the laptop's wireless connection. There's no drive bay for a second drive in the laptop, to which I could copy the data from the first one; and anyway, the first one is nonresponsive. So I buy one of those little adapters that allow you to connect a 2.5" laptop drive to a regular 3.5" desktop drive cable. I figure maybe the problem is with the laptop, and this way I can copy my data directly to a hard drive in the desktop machine. I put the laptop drive in the desktop machine and play with multiple ways of plugging it in. The adapter doesn't come with instructions. I experiment with jumper settings, reverse plug-in options (the adapter fits the laptop drive both ways), etc. Nothing works. I cannot get the desktop to recognize the laptop drive. It's not a problem with the desktop machine. That connector is good; I have a different 3.5" drive hooked up to it right now. I assume the 2.5" Hitachi drive is acting this way because this is how it has been acting in the laptop too. I download some recovery software with a free trial version, I think, that lets you see the data but not recover it. The software I download is GetDataBack. I install it on the desktop machine. It, too, fails to see the 2.5" hard drive. Tonight, the Dell rep online thinks that maybe the hard drive is not properly connected to the laptop's motherboard. But would that explain why the little drive was not working in the desktop machine either? No connection option seemed to work. Dell says I may just have to pay a grand for data recovery services. That'll be the day. I've got a backup that's some days old; I'll have to be content with using that, and with losing some irreplaceable data. It just seems strange that, on this very evening, I was able to boot the laptop into Windows XP Safe Mode and then into Normal mode. I noticed this same thing previously: if I let the sucker sit for a few days, it seems to clear its mind and be ready to work again. Tonight, being cautious, I shut the machine down after both of these boots, because some newsgroup posting said that this was what someone else should have done immediately after a similar hibernation screwup: just do a normal shutdown and reboot. But after it did boot into Safe and Normal modes, it refused to boot anymore and, once again, it stopped recognizing the drive. I was thinking that maybe the solution is to let the thing sit again for a day or two and then do my first boot with the 2.5" drive connected to the desktop machine. That way, I might get some life out of it before it craps out. At times in the past, I noticed that recalcitrant hard drives seemed to work better if you let them sit for a while, or when the temperature cooled down. Sure enough, I have just discovered the "freezer trick": put the hard drive in a baggie in the freezer for a few hours, and then recover data from it before it warms up too much. See e.g., http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1122363710 and http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/w...um/136644.html This, I am thinking, may be a way to accelerate the cooling-down process. I'll do it repeatedly if necessary. That's my next tack, after finishing this message. All this talk about the BIOS, in the webpages just cited and elsewhere, belatedly makes me think that maybe the hard drive was accustomed to working with the BIOS of the previous motherboard, which I might have flashed to update it, and maybe they installed a mobo with an older BIOS that somehow confused the issue. This seems a little vague and goofy, but since it's probably a good idea to update the laptop's BIOS anyway, I guess I'll also see if I can figure out how to do that from a CD drive. (The laptop has no floppy, and that's what Dell's downloads seem to prefer.) It may be just as well that the 2.5" drive was unresponsive in the desktop machine. As I recall, Windows gets confused if you have more than one Windows program partition in the same machine. So what I probably should do, after connecting the 2.5" drive to the desktop machine, is to boot the desktop machine from the CD drive, using either Knoppix Linux or Drive Image, so as to get the data off without booting into Windows. Dell is sending a tech to try to fiddle with the mobo some more, but I still don't think that's the problem. I've seen several messages online indicating that the problem in a situation like this is surely with the hard drive. I really don't want it to be the hard drive. I see where another guy had this same thing. See http://tinyurl.com/72fn3. He didn't confirm whether the hard drive was the problem in that case. If anyone has any ideas about any of this, I would be very interested in hearing them. At any rate, I thought it would be prudent to record the details for future reference by myself and others. |
#2
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You can reinstall WinXP and still have your data. Did you try the Repair
option? Before you try that, make sure which selections to make so you won't end up reformatting and destroying your data. On the big computer, was the master/slave jumper set correctly? You put it in as a slave and booted to your normal hard drive? Is the drive set up with FAT32 or NTFS partitions? I don't work for these folks, so I am just passing this along, but they seem to have a good disk recovery program to possibly get some of your data back. I think it is around $100. http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm It might help get some back, but if the drive is physically damaged, it might not. Clark wrote in message ps.com... I have a nearly new Inspiron 2200. Microphone input isn't working right. Dell chat line representative insists on scheduling technician to replace the motherboard. Unfortunately, the technician leaves two screws loose when replacing the mobo. I have the tech come back to fix this mysterious new buzzing noise. This time, I make the mistake of handing the laptop to the tech while it is still in hibernation mode. I do not realize this is a mistake at the time, but I soon find out. The tech doesn't check the machine's power status; he immediately removes the motherboard while it is still in hibernation. snip |
#3
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Unfortunately, the WinXP CD's Repair option is available only when the
CD can see the hard drive. I used it to run CHKDSK, as noted above, but now it is not seeing the drive at all. In the big computer, I tried making it both primary and secondary IDE master. In both cases, I tried both master and cable select jumper options. In no case did the machine recognize it. The machine did boot as usual when I used the usual hard drive as primary master. The partitions are mostly NTFS. One is FAT32. I've heard good things about SpinRite over the years. But I suspect it, too, will not see the drive. When the drive is nonfunctional, not even the BIOS sees it. |
#4
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Funkiest suggestion yet, from
http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-623...sageID=1774555 Connect the drive up to a desktop as a secondary drive, leave it lay outside the machine so that you can get to it and carefully open the drive, boot the desktop on the primary drive once the machine gets started and the old drive is not spinning gently give it a spin to help it get started, if this process works BACK UP YOUR INFO!!! and trash the drive. |
#5
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Note also the other suggestions listed on Experts Exchange at
http://www.experts-exchange.com/Oper..._21265988.html I have tried all of these except editing the boot.ini, which I presently can't get to. |
#6
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wrote in message ps.com... I have a nearly new Inspiron 2200. Microphone input isn't working right. Dell chat line representative insists on scheduling technician to replace the motherboard. Unfortunately, the technician leaves two screws loose when replacing the mobo. I have the tech come back to fix this mysterious new buzzing noise. This time, I make the mistake of handing the laptop to the tech while it is still in hibernation mode. I do not realize this is a mistake at the time, but I soon find out. The tech doesn't check the machine's power status; he immediately removes the motherboard while it is still in hibernation. After this, the machine starts acting funky -- primarily freezing during or shortly after bootup. snip "System exchange". Stew |
#7
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Update: I tried the freezer trick. I left it in the freezer for only
one hour. Being a very thin drive, I felt that an hour would be enough to cool it all the way through at least slightly. This did not yield any noticeable results; the same error message came up. I suspect what is happening, during these days of delay, is not a benefit of cooling. Rather, I think, something inside the drive is relaxing or switching position. Note one problem with the freezer trick: in humid climates, the frozen drive will draw condensation. You could have electrical shorts -- could even have a little puddle -- inside your laptop. So after trying this, I took out the drive and put it down to warm up and dry out. Also, I would think the extreme cold of the freezer could be bad for the drive -- might reduce its chances of functioning properly. According to the manufacturer's specifications webpage (see http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k80/5k80.htm), the low end of the operating ambient temperature range is 5 degrees centigrade, or around 40 degrees Fahrenheit. That's fridge temperature, maybe, but freezers are obviously below 0 C / 32 F. I wondered if the thing that makes the difference is not merely letting it sit, or cooling it down; perhaps moving the laptop from one place to another, as I did during the past few days of disuse, helps to reseat or reposition something. After partly warming the drive, after the freezer trick, I shook it and reinserted it. This did not make a difference. About flashing the BIOS: I contacted Dell. A Dell support rep recommended I pay for DriveSavers. See http://www.drivesavers.com/disaster_recovery/index.html. I said Dell should pay, since their tech caused the damage. He did not agree. But as I look at the DriveSavers page, I see a list of hard drive problems that confirms my sense that the hard drive itself may still be functional -- because none of the items on that list (e.g., water damage, head crash noises) seems to apply, and because Hitachi says that a large percentage (40%?) of drives returned to it are actually not defunkted. (That wasn't their word.) Dell's tech ran me around in circles for a while; then their chat service crapped out. So I'm on my own for now, with just two things left to try. First is the BIOS update. Without a floppy drive, it has not been easy to figure out how to do this. One guy recommends UltraISO to add BIOS flash files to a bootable CD; but I see some really bad reviews of UltraISO somewhere, so I am reluctant to use that. ISOBuster comes well recommended, but it looks complicated. Fiddling around, I burn one bootable CD that doesn't actually boot. Then I give up on that for now. The other thing to try is to go further on the earlier theory of a bad motherboard connection. Reposting an interesting suggestion posted in alt.sys.pc-clone.dell on 9/2/04: *** BEGIN REPOST *** IME, this error occurs especially after the hard drive has been removed, changed or if the machine has experienced some kind of shock, like being dropped. What can have happened is that the connector between the hard drive and the laptop has become unaligned. There exists a page of instructions for dealing with this, though I can't for the life of me find it now, but they condense as follows (hire yourself a guy to do this if you're not confident about it yourself!) 1. With the screen closed, remove the 'K' screws on the underside of the laptop, and the hard drive's screw on the right side of the laptop. 2. With the laptop the right way up, carefully open the screen and slowly lift up the keyboard at the right hand side. 3. With care, the keyboard can be laid face down over the left of the machine without stressing the connectors attached to it. The hard drive to the right is now exposed. It may be obvious that the disk drive's connector is not pushed in, or it may not. The best advice I've seen on the web is to ensure that it fits both the hard drive /and/ the motheboard as closely as possible, and so one should remove the hard drive from the bay, then bend the caddy around the connector back so when it goes in, it goes all the way. However, on one occasion this didn't work for me. It turned out that my connector could be pushed *too far* into the motherboard's slot: I used a flat screwdriver to create a little distance between the two, and only then did the error messages vanish, and the OS could boot. *** END REPOST *** I think he should have said, disconnect the power supply and remove the battery before starting. Also, the screws on the underside of my Inspiron 2200 are labeled P, M (memory), and D (display?), not K. I take out every screw in sight, except the M screw, but can't t get at the ones under the display. So, not wanting to rip the machine apart, I stop this approach at that point. |
#8
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#9
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Back to basics. If the BIOS cannot see the drive, no way no how will any
software (Spinrite, etc) be able to see it. The odds are at least 99 to 1 in favor of this assertion. Possible reasons why the BIOS won't see the drive in a notebook: Faulty connection between drive and motherboard Faulty motherboard Defective drive That's about it. Possible reasons why the BIOS won't see the drive in a desktop system: Defective drive faulty connection to motherboard (can't be a bad motherboard, 'cause it works!) incorrect jumpering of drive If someone is quite experienced at hitching up 2.5" drives to a desktop computer, the possibilities narrow down to defective drive or defective drive. Why would the drive become defective? Failed circuit board Failed inner workings inside sealed portion drive (heads, platters etc) If the circuit board has failed, it is possible to bring a drive back to life by swapping a know good circuit board from an IDENTICAL model of drive. I've done this successfully numerous times with normal 3.5" desktop drives, but never with a notebook drive. Given what the Dell tech did, leaving metal parts boncing around inside the computer, the odds are pretty good that the notebook's motherboard has developed some flaws when the metal parts made contact with the board. Now get back to Dell, escalate the problem, contact your state's consumer protection division and raise hell because Dell's incompetent service tech got you into this mess and they are responsible for getting you out of it. At the same time, assess the value of whatever data and programs are on the drive. If it will cost you lots of time and/or money to get your data back, a drive recovery service is probably worthwhile, though very pricey. (I'm assuming you have the media to reinstall all your important software on a replacement hard drive, or that you can download all the software like Acrobat Reader at no cost.). At this point, the best course of action would seem to be Dell providing an entire replacement system, especially if the amount of your own personal and valuable information is minimal. Or maybe Dell refunds your money and you go your separate ways? ... Ben Myers On 6 Aug 2005 22:45:10 -0700, wrote: I have a nearly new Inspiron 2200. Microphone input isn't working right. Dell chat line representative insists on scheduling technician to replace the motherboard. SNIP If anyone has any ideas about any of this, I would be very interested in hearing them. At any rate, I thought it would be prudent to record the details for future reference by myself and others. |
#10
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The machine being in hibernation had nothing to do with the hard drive
problem. When your computer is in hibernation, it is off the same way it is off if you had shut it down. All hibernation does is save the contents of what is in memory to a file on the hard drive. It then turns the computer off. When you power it back up, it loads what is in that file back into main memory and leaves you where you left off. If the tech dropped the drive or did not handle it properly, he could have damaged it. It also could be that its failing is just a coincidence. wrote in message ps.com... I have a nearly new Inspiron 2200. Microphone input isn't working right. Dell chat line representative insists on scheduling technician to replace the motherboard. Unfortunately, the technician leaves two screws loose when replacing the mobo. I have the tech come back to fix this mysterious new buzzing noise. This time, I make the mistake of handing the laptop to the tech while it is still in hibernation mode. I do not realize this is a mistake at the time, but I soon find out. The tech doesn't check the machine's power status; he immediately removes the motherboard while it is still in hibernation. After this, the machine starts acting funky -- primarily freezing during or shortly after bootup. I try some old familiar fixes, like Norton Disk Doctor. Nothing helps. Eventually, I discover it is possible to use the Recover option when booting from the Windows XP program CD. Inside Recover, I run CHKDSK /R instead of CHKDSK /P, which I think might have been the better approach. I run some diagnostics. The Hitachi online rep says the results indicate that the Dell tech basically trashed the hard drive by dismantling the system while it was in hibernation mode. Hitachi gives me an RMA for the drive. But I really don't want to lose data from that drive. My most recent backup is several days old. So I play around a bit more. At this point, the machine is functioning less well. At first, after the catastropic Dell service call, it would boot into WinXP and then slow down or freeze. Now it is sometimes not even recognizing the hard drive on bootup. I look in the BIOS Setup and it says there's no hard drive. I try booting from the CD and I get the same thing, whether booting with the WinXP CD, a Knoppix Linux self-contained CD, or a Hitachi diagnostics CD. The error message I'm getting is this: internal hard disk drive not found No bootable devices -- strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility After the first several boots into WinXP, I am getting this error message more frequently. This decaying performance seems familiar -- it does seem like the behavior of a failing drive. But I'm not sure it adds up. If the Dell tech fried the circuits on the drive, it seems like it would perform at the same level consistently. I am guessing that dismantling a hibernated machine would not do any surface-level damage to a drive, of a type that would yield decaying reliability. I would like to get my data off this hard drive. But the options seem limited. I don't know how to configure Knoppix to use the laptop's wireless connection. There's no drive bay for a second drive in the laptop, to which I could copy the data from the first one; and anyway, the first one is nonresponsive. So I buy one of those little adapters that allow you to connect a 2.5" laptop drive to a regular 3.5" desktop drive cable. I figure maybe the problem is with the laptop, and this way I can copy my data directly to a hard drive in the desktop machine. I put the laptop drive in the desktop machine and play with multiple ways of plugging it in. The adapter doesn't come with instructions. I experiment with jumper settings, reverse plug-in options (the adapter fits the laptop drive both ways), etc. Nothing works. I cannot get the desktop to recognize the laptop drive. It's not a problem with the desktop machine. That connector is good; I have a different 3.5" drive hooked up to it right now. I assume the 2.5" Hitachi drive is acting this way because this is how it has been acting in the laptop too. I download some recovery software with a free trial version, I think, that lets you see the data but not recover it. The software I download is GetDataBack. I install it on the desktop machine. It, too, fails to see the 2.5" hard drive. Tonight, the Dell rep online thinks that maybe the hard drive is not properly connected to the laptop's motherboard. But would that explain why the little drive was not working in the desktop machine either? No connection option seemed to work. Dell says I may just have to pay a grand for data recovery services. That'll be the day. I've got a backup that's some days old; I'll have to be content with using that, and with losing some irreplaceable data. It just seems strange that, on this very evening, I was able to boot the laptop into Windows XP Safe Mode and then into Normal mode. I noticed this same thing previously: if I let the sucker sit for a few days, it seems to clear its mind and be ready to work again. Tonight, being cautious, I shut the machine down after both of these boots, because some newsgroup posting said that this was what someone else should have done immediately after a similar hibernation screwup: just do a normal shutdown and reboot. But after it did boot into Safe and Normal modes, it refused to boot anymore and, once again, it stopped recognizing the drive. I was thinking that maybe the solution is to let the thing sit again for a day or two and then do my first boot with the 2.5" drive connected to the desktop machine. That way, I might get some life out of it before it craps out. At times in the past, I noticed that recalcitrant hard drives seemed to work better if you let them sit for a while, or when the temperature cooled down. Sure enough, I have just discovered the "freezer trick": put the hard drive in a baggie in the freezer for a few hours, and then recover data from it before it warms up too much. See e.g., http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1122363710 and http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/w...um/136644.html This, I am thinking, may be a way to accelerate the cooling-down process. I'll do it repeatedly if necessary. That's my next tack, after finishing this message. All this talk about the BIOS, in the webpages just cited and elsewhere, belatedly makes me think that maybe the hard drive was accustomed to working with the BIOS of the previous motherboard, which I might have flashed to update it, and maybe they installed a mobo with an older BIOS that somehow confused the issue. This seems a little vague and goofy, but since it's probably a good idea to update the laptop's BIOS anyway, I guess I'll also see if I can figure out how to do that from a CD drive. (The laptop has no floppy, and that's what Dell's downloads seem to prefer.) It may be just as well that the 2.5" drive was unresponsive in the desktop machine. As I recall, Windows gets confused if you have more than one Windows program partition in the same machine. So what I probably should do, after connecting the 2.5" drive to the desktop machine, is to boot the desktop machine from the CD drive, using either Knoppix Linux or Drive Image, so as to get the data off without booting into Windows. Dell is sending a tech to try to fiddle with the mobo some more, but I still don't think that's the problem. I've seen several messages online indicating that the problem in a situation like this is surely with the hard drive. I really don't want it to be the hard drive. I see where another guy had this same thing. See http://tinyurl.com/72fn3. He didn't confirm whether the hard drive was the problem in that case. If anyone has any ideas about any of this, I would be very interested in hearing them. At any rate, I thought it would be prudent to record the details for future reference by myself and others. |
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