I took a look at a "dead" hard drive for a friend today. It's not being
recognized by the BIOS anymore.

Once or twice the drive was recognized OK, and during those times the
diagnostic software I used indicated that the drive had a bad sector 0.

Is the information that a drive presents to a computer's BIOS stored
somewhere as data on the platters somewhere? (I was thinking that the
information was in the firmware of the drive) Could this be a case
where the drive developed enough bad sectors, and because they happen to
be in the sector 0 area, it's not being recognized by the BIOS?

Comments?


-WD

Did you use the diagnostics from the manufacturer? It may detect the drive
when the BIOS doesn't

The BIOS does an ATA Identify, which will fail if the drive firmware doesn't
load, or takes too long because of read retries. It also reads the MBR, but
that shouldn't prevent detection.

"Will Dormann" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:WTCdc.6453$(E-Mail Removed)...
> I took a look at a "dead" hard drive for a friend today. It's not being
> recognized by the BIOS anymore.
>
> Once or twice the drive was recognized OK, and during those times the
> diagnostic software I used indicated that the drive had a bad sector 0.
>
> Is the information that a drive presents to a computer's BIOS stored
> somewhere as data on the platters somewhere? (I was thinking that the
> information was in the firmware of the drive) Could this be a case
> where the drive developed enough bad sectors, and because they happen to
> be in the sector 0 area, it's not being recognized by the BIOS?
>

Eric Gisin wrote:

> Did you use the diagnostics from the manufacturer? It may detect the drive
> when the BIOS doesn't

I did, and it didn't. It's a Quantum Fireball. I used Maxtor
Powermax, which explicitly states it is for use with Quantum drives too.
It immediately came back with an error code ending in "E02" when I ran
it and the drive was detected by the BIOS. When it wasn't detected by
the BIOS, Powermax didn't see the drive. I remember at some point
being able to google a PDF that listed out the error codes and what they
mean, but that document doesn't seem to be available anymore.

I'm curious as to what utilities can access a drive when it's not
recognized by the BIOS.

-WD

Will Dormann <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:WTCdc.6453$(E-Mail Removed)...

> I took a look at a "dead" hard drive for a friend today.
> It's not being recognized by the BIOS anymore.

> Once or twice the drive was recognized OK, and during those times the
> diagnostic software I used indicated that the drive had a bad sector 0.

> Is the information that a drive presents to a computer's BIOS
> stored somewhere as data on the platters somewhere?

That varys with the drive. Some of the maxtors do fall back to
a different report when the drive cant read the platters anymore.

> (I was thinking that the information was in the firmware of the drive)

Yes, but not always all the information.

> Could this be a case where the drive developed enough
> bad sectors, and because they happen to be in the
> sector 0 area, it's not being recognized by the BIOS?

Its more likely in your case that the logic card has an
intermittent fault and thats why it sometimes responds
to the ATA identify command issued by the bios and
sometimes it doesnt and so doesnt get listed by the bios.

You can also get that effect with a bad cable too.