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Dead hard drive

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groovyjon

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Jun 12, 2008
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I have a SATA hard drive that seems to have died or got corrupted or something and I could do with grabbing the data off it. I've followed various instructions on the internet, but so far without success. Details below.

Computer won't boot up, just stops at a black screen saying:
"PXE-E61 Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F Exiting NVIDIA Boot Agent.
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

I've gone into the BIOS and ensured the HDD boots before any network devices, and I have even reset the BIOS settings back to their factory defaults.

I've bought a USB docking station and plugged the drive into that. I can hear appropriate noises when it starts up (brief buzz, high pitched whirring) so the hardware seems to be working, and there are no untoward clicking noises or anything to cause concern. But the drive is just not visible. I've gone into the Disk Management utility in Win 7 but it doesn't show it.

I've tested another SATA drive in the docking station and it could see that fine, so the docking station is not faulty.

Most advice on the net seems to be how to retrieve data from a drive that doesn't boot any more, but that assumes that the drive is still visible and accessible. This one isn't.

Any ideas?
 
But surely I'll need to see the drive to use that? The drive isn't showing up at all so I can't tell any program to undelete anything.
 
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If your data is important to you, you could pay a data retrieval expert or company to try to extract it for you. I wouldn't expect that to be cheap though.

It might also be that the platters are fine, but the device controller is broken. Again, someone with some expertise could try to replace the device controller for you, which may then make your drive readable again.

I hope that helps.

Good luck!
 
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If it's a hardware failure then you may have to use a professional data recovery company, however they are very expensive.

If you can find another drive of the same make/model you could try swapping the controllers over to see if thats the problem.

Software solutions will only work if your PC can see the drive, you could putting the drive back into the original machine and then booting it using Hirens boot CD as this comes with a lot of utilites for reading data from damaged drives. http://www.hirensbootcd.org/files/Hirens.BootCD.15.1.zip
 
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By the way, the stellar program has a free trial which will show you whether the files are recoverable easily.

You could try that before sending the hard disk to a professional data recovery company.

It won't make any changes to the hard disk, so if it doesnt work, you'll still have the option of sending it to a recovery company.
 
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Dan_Kesher said:
...You could try that before sending the hard disk to a professional data recovery company.

It won't make any changes to the hard disk, so if it doesnt work, you'll still have the option of sending it to a recovery company.
Click to expand...

One of my clients is a Forensically trained expert in data recovery and his general advice is:

***IMPORTANT: If your hard drive has failed then STOP what you were doing and switch your machine off at the power. Don't shut down or try recovering the data as you may cause further damage.***

He also has a no-fix-no-fee policy and transparent pricing which IMO is great value if your data is important to you.

http://www.visithorsham.co.uk/Business/Rescue_Your_Data.aspx

Regards

Dotty
 
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I do think your only option would be to send it to a data recovery company. You could try http://www.comgen.co.uk/ and speak to Peter Friedman. He is always very up front with how much things will cost before he starts.

In future though the key is taking good backups. Prevention is always the best policy.
 
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I knew it wouldn't be long before someone mentioned back ups and wagged their finger at me! Yes, I know, I'm ashamed.

But thanks for all the suggestions, I'll follow them up now.
 
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Sounds like a hardware fault, the message you are getting on boot is your computer trying to boot from network, it cant see your HDD at all or cant see your HDD had a bootable partition.

Does the drive spin up? while the commuter is on does it make any noise (like a faint humming is normal, no noise or a clicking is bad)

If it is a hardware fault (sound like it may be) it used to cost us around £600 to have the data removed from the drive in lab conditions.

Steve
 
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Steve_g said:
Does the drive spin up? while the commuter is on does it make any noise (like a faint humming is normal, no noise or a clicking is bad)
Click to expand...

It does spin up. I hear it start and then like you say a faint humming while it's on. No other sounds. So it *appears* to be working normally, just has become invisible.
 
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groovyjon said:
It does spin up. I hear it start and then like you say a faint humming while it's on. No other sounds. So it *appears* to be working normally, just has become invisible.
Click to expand...

In that case the parititon may have just fell over.

What make PC do you have? do you have another computer handy that you can plug this suspect drive in?

Steve
 
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It's an HP desktop PC. I've just put the suspect drive into another HP PC and it first took ages on something to do with the MAC address, and then it came up with a different error:

PXE-E53: No boot filename received
PXE-M0F: Exiting NVIDIA Boot Agent
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
 
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groovyjon said:
It's an HP desktop PC. I've just put the suspect drive into another HP PC and it first took ages on something to do with the MAC address, and then it came up with a different error:

PXE-E53: No boot filename received
PXE-M0F: Exiting NVIDIA Boot Agent
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
Click to expand...

That error again just indicates that it cant see the hard drive and has attempted to boot from the PXE network (and failed as you likely don't have a PXE network in place)

If it s a newish HP (around 4 years or newer) it will have a HDD diagnostic test in BIOS, when the computer first turns on and it shows the HP screen press F12, this will take you into BIOS, use the navigation arrows to move across to "Storage" then select the drive diagnostics (this is going from memory, may be called something slightly different) this will let you know if your HDD has a hardware issue. if it states no HDD is detected then its going to be a hardware fault - this will take about 40 mins to test the drive

Another thing to try is to plug it into the second PC along with the second PC's HDD, it should automatically boot the operating system on the good drive and load windows, depending on what version of Windows you have go to:

XP: Control panel - Administrative tools - computer management, on the left hand side under storage management you will see HDD management, click on this and it will show you every drive detected by windows and its current state (formatted, partitions ect)

Windows 7: just type "disk management" in the search box in the start menu.

Not sure about Vista, try both methods - im sure one will work.

This is all going form memory and things may be worded slightly differently.

Failing all of that take the drive to PC World, they should be able to plug the drive in and see if the data is accessible or not, when i worked at PC World (many moons ago) it cost £30 data recovery if the drive was ok, they could arrange to send the drive away for lab recovery for around £500-700 if the drive was faulty.

Anyway - good luck.

Backing up is a massive pain and not always possible, i personally use a mirroe raid system, its easy to set up and just works on its own. http://www.arcoide.com/product.aspx?PageId=260 a it just automatically copies your data onto 2 drives so you always have a good HDD with all your data.

Steve
 
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Thanks Steve, I went into the diagnostics but it failed when it came to the HDD as it said no drives found, so does look like a hardware fault.

I've plugged the drive into a SATA docking station on another working PC but I couldn't see it within the disk management console.

I'm currently looking at sending it away for data recovery at a cost of £395.

I'll look into that RAID system, I know that's what we installed on the web server after a similar incident.
 
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groovyjon said:
This is the exact drive I have. Seems I'm not alone...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate-barracuda-7200-drives-failing

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/16/barracuda_failure_plague/
Click to expand...

Yes, sadly you can get rogue drives like this that have a much higher failure rate than normal. It really looks as if your only option is a data recovery company. If the hard drive cannot even be seen then there's no point in running O/S based repair software. As you have found it won't do anything. You need specialist hardware to allow direct access to the drive geometry.
 
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groovyjon said:
This is the exact drive I have. Seems I'm not alone...

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate-barracuda-7200-drives-failing

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/16/barracuda_failure_plague/
Click to expand...

Yes, sadly you can get rogue drives like this that have a much higher failure rate than normal. It really looks as if your only option is a data recovery company. If the hard drive cannot even be seen then there's no point in running O/S based repair software. As you have found it won't do anything. You need specialist hardware to allow direct access to the drive geometry.

Even if you implement RAID in the future just remember that this is no a substitute for a good backup strategy. Even though RAID protects against individual disk failure it doesn't protect against all types of failure or data corruption.
 
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