On Sunday 06 May 2007 23:47, Michael Juntunen wrote:

--- "Rajko M." <rmatov101@charter.net> wrote:

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On Sunday 06 May 2007 17:01, Michael Juntunen wrote:

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I have two hard drives.

The first has suddenly become invisible. I have booted Knoppix.

Booted Knoppix?! What that might have with drive failure? If it failed.

I didn't know that drive failure was necessarily a likely possibility. I was trying something, hoping for positive results.

If you can't see the drive in BIOS than it doesn't respond properly or not at all, and operating system can't do much about it.

...

...

I have taken the hard drive out of the system, plugged it into a usb external case,

and

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plugged it into my laptop (which is running XP but

has

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been modified to see ext3 file systems). I have

run

...

spinrite. Nothing sees this drive.

Spinrite from grc.com?

Yes.

If drive is not recognized by BIOS that DOS based Spinrite will not find it either. <snip> However sudden death of electronics with or without know reason is always possible, that is why people make backups. If you had really important data on it and electronics is dead than data can be salvaged, but it can cost you a lot. Sometimes is possible to replace electronic board with the one from another drive of the same kind, but that is job for technicians.

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The drive does spinup but for some reason is not registering as being there.

1) Wrong jumper settings. 2) Wrong cable - for cable select is used different type of cable.

I have used the same cable and settings for over 6 months, so is this still something I need to change?

Depends on quality of the cable. In case that cable had hidden factory problem even one time disconnect can make cable to fail. The same is valid for connector on hard disk. As you had a problem after putting hard disk in the the external case than problem is on the hard drive and it can come from: - electrostatic discharge from your fingers to electronics on hard disk that fried some chip - bad connector on hard disk - bad power supply voltage in external case that fried electronics - some kind of failure on IDE 40 pin connector in external case that fried IO buffer on hard disk You can test the external case using voltmeter or some old hard disk that can be fried if there is any failure, though I would recommend to measure voltages on power connector first, and make sure that drive is good ie. it can be recognized in computer. Right now I would not use second hard disk for experiments with external case. <snip> -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org