I am in process of fixing a PC for a family member. Its a small shop homebrew, ASUS MB, Athalon processor, 512MB RAM, VIA Chipset, etc, running WinXP. It was delivered to me non-booting and caked with dust. First step was to clean it, then start checking.
After running through the boot sequence, final message was "No Boot Drive detected...." Watching the POST, it was not seeing the 40GB Maxtor HD. Bios settings were correct, was able to boot off Win 98 diskette. Running utilities like MaxBlast, no HD seen.
Swapped in a 20GB WD Drive off an old tower, and it booted up just fine, running WinMe that was installed on the WD. Powered down, plugged in the Maxtor as a Slave (Grey connector, jumper in proper place), rebooted, and back to the original problem. No boot disk detected)
Thought maybe it had something to do with Windows versions, and File Systems, so I disconnected the Maxtor, rebooted just fine on the WD, reformatted it to NTSF, installed WinXP, did all the updates to SP2, and continued on with all current updates. It runs fine.
NOW, all I want to do is recover some important files from the Maxtor. (Geneology stuff). As soon as I plug in the IDE cable (grey connector + power) and reboot, I'm back to the same initial "No Boot DIsk" error. Reading other posts here, I've tried different configurations for the jumpers on both the WD and the Maxtor, as well as the BIOS set-up. No luck.
When the Maxtor is on the IDE cable, I can hear it making a short buzzing sound (like head is trying to move?) three times, spaced out during the POST. POST shows the WD Drive and the CD ROM as being present, but not the Maxtor, and still eventually goes to the "No Boot Disk" message. (takes about 5 minutes)
Don't have the cash for a professional data recovery service, so I'm looking for any suggestions on how to get the data off this drive, short of opening it up and scrapping it off with a putty knife.
thanks in advance,
John
