hard drive failure

[David]

Hi,
My friend is having a problem with his works computer...
On boot-up,an error comes up saying "No Operating Sytem".....

I said i'd take a look,so attached it to an external USB hard drive mount
and tried to access his important data...
It doesn't appear as a mass storage device on either 2000,XP or Vista....

On disk management in Vista it shows up but says the drive is not
initialized...
When i try to initialize the drive it states the error "Could not initialize
due to an I/O error"

XP or 2000 cannot read the disk this way either?


Any thoughts on this problem?
Has he lost all data?

many thanks,
dAVE

 

[Juan Perez]

Hi:

For the information your are given us, looks like a hardware failure of the
HDD controller of the HDD itself. If the HDD were formatted in NTFS, windows
XP or Vista, should be able to read it. Check the cable used. You did not
told us it it was a SATA o EIDE hard disk drive.

Also try to check if the HDD still on warranty, maybe your friend is
lucky.

Also if all fails, take note of the HDD brand and model, try to get a
similar HDD and swap the HDD controller. As a last resort you can your HDD
to a recovery service, but it is expensive.

Let us know if you fix it.

 

[David]

Thankyou for replying..
It is indeed a EIDE,

I have since suggested a recovery data service,not much i else i can think
of..
I'll let you know what happens.

Thanks again for the help
dAVID