HDD erased?

[insidiousbookworm]

OK, so one of my users has apparently completely erased his HDD. When you try to boot the system, it first displays an "IDE device failed error." So you hit F1 and then you get a "Non-system disk or disk error".

I got into the diagnostics and tried to run a hard drive test--it came back immediately stating "no hard drive installed". So I checked all of the cables, reseated everything, and tried again: same result.

So I removed the HDD and plugged in as a slave in another machine, but I can't initialize it all, so I can't access it.

1. I have no idea how he did this (he stated that he was just trying to view some backup info on a CD)
2. Does anyone have any ideas on if any of the data on the drive might be recoverable? And if so, how do I get to it?

I'm going to talk to him again and try to figure out exactly what happened, but I'm not hopeful.

 

[carnageX]

Try booting off of a Linux LiveCD (such as Ubuntu) and see if you can access it that way - I've had better luck recovering data off of sketchy HDD's that way.