Harddrive Helpup

[Hank]

Hello. I have a Maxto DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB ATA Harddrive. I recently installed Windows XP Professional on a second partition on my harddrive, after I installed it I deleted my first partition from my harddrive then I couldn't boot into windows again. I recovered my first partition using acronis and deleted my second partition and tried to reinstall windows xp on the first partition and on the windows xp setup it displayed one partition so I deleted it and I got a blue screen saying I have caused a critical error, must reboot. So I reboot and now I get "Operating System Not Found". I have tried to hook it up to a external drive and recover partition but it doesn't display the drive. I have ran the Maxtor setup disk and it display "No Maxtor Drives Found". Please Help. Thanks

[merlin_2]

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000181.htm

[Hank]

thank you merlin but I have tried to reinstall Windows again and I get a error message saying no harddrives were found.

[merlin_2]

check your ide cables and set them up master /slave by moving the jumpers..check they are shown in the bios del key on boot...after this third party-partition software has caused this problem win2k/xp has disk management?>http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309000 try to reinstall your old drive first any results?....

[Hank]

They are connected fine. I have also connected the harddrive to my external case thingy and it runs but it does not display a drive.

[merlin_2]

 hank are we talking windows or bios my friend?go into the bios set-up del key on boot ...are they displayed in there? chose set-up defaults options and auto detect hard drives..anything ...also if you mobo is old you may need a bios update to support a bigger hard drive...most can handle 40gig the old  mobo ones..

[Hank]

My harddrive worked fine for 4 months. I think the problem is I have no partitions. I deleted everything. Any way to restore a partition so i can use the harddrive again?

[merlin_2]

http://www.softpile.com/Utilities/Backup/Review_12011_index.html

[Hank]

I guess the harddrive is dead because this doesn't detect it either.

[2k dummy]

By deleteing the partitions you have probably lost all the data on the drive unless you want to pay for data recovery (expensive). Try installing it as the only HD and boot from your EBD. Run fdisk and see if it detects the drive. If it does, you will have to repartion and format the drive.

[Hank]

Thank you 2k dummy. What is EBD?

Thanks

[2k dummy]

Emergency Boot Disk. You can probably use any bootable floppy that has fdisk on it since there is no OS on the HD.

[Hank]

Oh well the hdd is dead I guess. fdisk didn't detect it

thanks guys