Read or write to bad drive ?

[John .]

Are there any stand-alone utilities that will read and/or write
(initialize) a hard drive that is not recognized by the bios?

I thought some utilities bypass the bios completely and write directly
to the drive.

I have a secondary hard drive WD that recently died, just click click
clicks and bios says it is WD 250 of only 8455 megabytes of data (it's
a 250GB!)--even if nothing else is connected. (I moved it to another
PC, switched cables, etc. but same problem).

A low level init of the master boot record maybe even if I set the
bios to none?

 

[Rod Speed]

Are there any stand-alone utilities that will read and/or write
(initialize) a hard drive that is not recognized by the bios?

Yes, most of the hard drive manufacturers provide one.

I thought some utilities bypass the bios
completely and write directly to the drive.

Yes, even Win does, it doesnt care what the bios lists.
It uses its own drivers to scan for drives independantly
of what the bios sees. Which is why you can set the
bios drive entry to NONE and Win will still see the drive.

I have a secondary hard drive WD that recently died, just click
click clicks and bios says it is WD 250 of only 8455 megabytes
of data (it's a 250GB!)--even if nothing else is connected.
(I moved it to another PC, switched cables, etc. but same problem).

She's dead, John. You into necrophilia ?

A low level init of the master boot record

There is no such animal as 'low level init of the master boot record'

You can certainly write zeros in the first physical
sector of the drive, which is where the MBR is stored,
but even crap in that sector wont make the drive
click or prevent the drive from being seen by the bios.

maybe even if I set the bios to none?

Bet the drive will still click because it cant read
the platters when it sees a hardware reset.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Are there any stand-alone utilities that will read and/or write
(initialize) a hard drive that is not recognized by the bios?

Try Knoppix (CD-only linux -> google). As any Linux, it does its
own controller and HDD detection.

Arno