Question : Problem: HDD Unknown device

Hi,
I have a hard drive that won't boot suddenly and when I go in the Bios under drive configuration I see unknown device instead of the drive name and other information that usually shows. I install a good drive and boot the computer and I'm statisfied that the other drive went out. I tried to add the old drive as a slave to hopefully get some data off of the drive. When I do this the master drive will not boot and the BIOS shows the Unknown Device again. I added a different slave and it works just fine. Has anybody seen this or know a way to get the data off of the old drive? Thanks, MCorn

Answer : Problem: HDD Unknown device

A sneaky trick might be to see if you can locate a used drive on eBay (same model no., natch) and carefully swap out the circuit board (if possible - most have variations on ribbon cables)

I actually did something like that as an emergency repair for a RAID drive during Y2K madness - on a long weekend Sunday... neccessity is the mother of invention!

For the previous point I'm assuming here that you can hear the drive spin up... that increases the odds of data recovery a lot

Another possibility is to first contact the drive manufacturer - ya never know how receptive they may be to helping you out...

Regards...