Hard Drive Detected but not Booting

[RhysAndrews]

I have an old Seagate Barracuda 250gig 7200.8 IDE/Ultra-ATA Drive. I unscrewed it from my case to have more room to remove a dvd burner.

I can't actually fit the hard-drive back into the case but i'm sure that's not the problem... i've managed to just rest it on top of the case or inside somewhere. The problem is, though the computer detects the hard-drive (and BIOS auto-detects and can give information about it like the size of it), when you get to the part of the setup process that has a list of the controllers / their IDs, with a double-line border around it, you have the blinking cursor at the bottom of the screen, and nothing happens.

Usually, it blinks once and then changes to the XP loading screen. But now it just blinks - no error, no nothing. Considering the data on a hard-drive is a physical shape on the disk I can only presume my data isn't lost, but is my controller card screwed or something? I'm really quite worried.

Thanks
-Rhys

 

[Osak]

The drive could be dead, I would suggest getting something like free agent to test the drives integrity.

 

[mammikoura]

try running this and see what happens.
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/

 

[RhysAndrews]

There's an issue with that, I'm afraid. I took my DVD Burner out because no burner works with my motherboard anymore - my motherboard has serious issues. I don't want to waste money on another motherboard... I don't think. Gah.

I have tried to put in an old hard-drive of mine into the computer - it seemed to 'boot' but as it was already partially screwed it came up a screen asking how to boot Windows (Safe mode, normal, best configuration, etc) - every option resulting in a blue screen of death or a reboot of the computer.

-Rhys

 

[RhysAndrews]

By the way, I have just tried running the hard drive on another computer (which also has a problem with it - overheating CPU @ 100 degrees celsius... by the way all these problems happened at once) and it does the same thing. Just after it verifies DMI pool data, it waits on a blinking pointer.

-Rhys

 

[mammikoura]

try seatools with that other computer? Though if the cpu is at 100c I wouldn't even bother booting up the computer, the cpu will just get destroyed.

Also, if seatools fits into a floppy then you can use that floppy to boot.

 

[RhysAndrews]

I managed to access my files by booting another hard-drive and opening it via My Computer. All solved, I don't need the screwed hard-drive anymore. Thanks everyone.

-Rhys