hard drives dead?

[einCe]

well, it seems that my motherboard has killed 2 of my hard drives, when i boot up it gives me a "disk read error please insert system disk and press enter"
i tried reinstalling windows but they dont seem to hold any data anymore ive tried resetting cmos and changing the hd to master instead of cs, and nothing. there is valuable info on these hard drives and im wondering if thres any way to get the data off of them, or repair them.

[KILLorBE]

What OS are you running?

Did you test the drives using a utility from the manufacturer (Like Maxblast/Powermax for Maxtor drives)?



i tried reinstalling windows but they dont seem to hold any data anymore
Did you reinstall or did you try to reinstall? If you reinstalled you may have overwritten important data (NEVER write to a drive if you're trying to recover data from that drive!!).

A free data recovery program is PC Inspector (http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm).

[einCe]

i tried reinstalling on the latter of the dead drives. the one i need data from is a western digital 40gb i would use a utility but it wont even post.

[KILLorBE]

You can check the drive using the WD Data Life Guard (http://support.wdc.com/) floppy or CD.

Is the drive recognized by the BIOS? (Not sure what you meant by "it wont even post") If not, when you're lucky it's the PCB that's dead....BUT you'll need the (Almost exact) same PCB, if it has minor changes it may not work.

Make sure the WD is the ONLY drive on the IDE cable (WD drives can be real picky about other drives on the same cable), also try every combination you can think of (Master/Slave/Cable Select, on both 1st connector and 2nd connector).

Was there an OS installed on the drive? If so, if it was XP and the MBR/Boot sector is corrupt you may be able to repair it using the recovery console and the Fixboot or Fixmbr command.
Note: Only try this if all else fails, it may make things worse (For example if there's a boot sector virus).

I suggest you don't make any changes to the drive for now (Like rewrite the MBR/boot sector), only try to access it as I've quite a bit of experience recovering data from bad HDD's, so I may have some other solutions (Depending on what your drive does or doesn't do).

BTW: Do you know what file system you used (NTFS/FAT)?

[einCe]

file system is ntfs, and bios does not recognise it at all. ill go and try those things right now thanks