Emergency - Hard Drive Recovery

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escapee

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Through some sleepless stupidity, Ive rendered the two drives I had on my primary IDE useless.

A 20G and a 40G Ive been using for two years, my bios will Not auto-detect them, and it should. I need to know if there is anyway to restore them to usefulness.

Ill tell my story(hope it makes sense, Ive been up all night); In process of flashing my bios, I needed to boot up with a boot floppy. At this point I accidentally let the win xp boot proceed, but interupted it by hitting reset, slapping the floppy in and proceeded to sucessfully flash the bios(thank god for that at least).

Upon reboot, windows warns me of the failed previous load but would not proceed with any boot option(it would freeze after hitting enter). So, I have no problem reinstalling my OS and proceeded with this, but it would not do that either. I knew the drive was messed at this point.

Ive since reinstalled on a spare 20G. The 40G I had as slave will not auto-detect in my bios. Ive accepted the lost data, but I need the hardware.

Any way to restore the drive to useability? Im doubtful. This is the stupidest thing Ive Ever done on a pc.

Hope this made sense, Ill clarify if needed. Thank you.
 
Maybe you can detect the drives in your BIOS settings. Set all four IDE channels to "auto".

Maybe you installed a worng BIOS version. you can try to find another version.
 
sounds like it's possibly your bios that's jacked and not your drives. Go into your bios and make sure it identifies both drives, if not, pretty good chance your bios may have gotten screwed in the flash process.
 
Thanks for replying.

Well, other drives work ok on the machine. These drives are shot(tested on another box). How 'exactly' I screwed them, I do not know. Im using the pc in question now, flashed bios and all.

Ive written them off for now. The sadness.

(This topic can be left to die, Im moving on.)
 
Well, my first stop initially was WD's website, looking at their utils. Didnt want to waste time barking at trees, so I submitted a question through their little system, still awaiting a repsonse.

How Im to format without a bios detection, I dont know. Was hoping against hope they had some guru-riffic technique. Ill let this forum know of anything useful I come up with.
 
does this mean it would be safer to... unplug all harddrives b4 flashing the bios?

u dont need anything but the floppy plugged in right, to flash the bios?
 
check you hard drive setting, if it is Cable select, change it to master, slave

try booting from your xp cd and pick create partitions then format them

i had this problem 2 weeks ago. i did a bunch of things

but one of the two above is what I did to get the motherboard to recognize them. I did them at together so I don't know which actually work, but I'm sure it was the first one
 
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