Is My Hard Drive Dead?

[BuddhaTB]

Not exactly my hard drive, but my cousin's hard drive is in question. I was given the computer to try to repair it. When you first turn on his HP system, it gives the error message of "No Operating System Detected" right after the startup screen. So I assume they deleted something in the windows folder.

My plan of action was to hook up their hard drive to my system and to copy over all their files. Once that was done, I was going to do a clean install with the HP System Restore CD that came with their system. However, when I hook up the hard drive to my computer as primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave, my windows XP will not detect the hard drive in question.

Has this hard drive gone bad? It's a Quantum Fireball 13.0 GB hard drive, so I suspect it to be 3-4 years old. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I hope to hear from you cfitz

[burninfool]

It sounds like the OS but there are companies that can get the info off the drive but it isn't cheap.If there is no important info then I would do a clean install with a Windows disk,the reason XP doesn't recognize the HDD is HP uses their own version of Windows.
My Dad had the same problem with his HP and I put a new OS on his system..no more problems.

[CDRecorder]

The only time that I know of that the "No Operating System Detected" message shows up is if the hard drive is not bootable (i.e. no MBR). Does the BIOS of your computer detect the drive from your cousin's computer? If it doesn't, I would say that the drive is probably dead.

I have seen a drive that would show the "No OS" message intermittently, but it would work occasionally (coincidentally, this was on an old HP, too). It eventually died, and the owner of the machine lost everything that was on the drive.

I saw some interesting hard drive data-recovery tips in PC World Magazine. You might want to give some of them a try if your cousin wants his/her data but won't pay for data recovery.

[BuddhaTB]

The only time that I know of that the "No Operating System Detected" message shows up is if the hard drive is not bootable (i.e. no MBR). Does the BIOS of your computer detect the drive from your cousin's computer? If it doesn't, I would say that the drive is probably dead.

BIOS does not detect the hard drive at all. I've tried it on a windows 98 machine and I still can't get my system to detect the hard drive. I'm planning to go out and buy a 30GB hard drive for $55 and that should solve this problem.

My cousin is a freshman in high school, so there's probably nothing in there paying money to save. Sucks there are no hard drive deals to be found this week for around $50 that I can pick up today. I know there are some good deals online, but we can't wait for the item to be shipped.

[Dartman]

If the motherboard doesn't see it it's probably dead. You might want to check the ide cable slot to make sure it doesn't have some folded pins cuasing the problem, also the power connecters can get flakey over time.