OT: Laptop hard drive - I'm stumped

How would you describe an otherwise functional hard drive that lost both copies of the master boot record, say from user error? Sounds very 'in between' to me. :)

--Winston

Is it possible that the drive has some sort of "high shock" cutout that laptops see telling them not to run the drive? Desktops would not check to see if they had been dropped. Jon

• * Anything being cooked a second time needs a hot oven.

Probably damaged part of the controller on the drive itself.

I would just install a new drive and reload if it was me. Stick the funky one in an enclosure and use it for transfer storage.

I'd call that a good hard drive.

when that disk isn't seen by a bunch of computers, I'd call it bad, no matter what some windows utility says on another computer.

Testing suspicious hardware all day doesn't fix it.

So this drive isn't 'in between', it's both good and bad?

Cool!

--Winston

no/broken MBR doesn't cause a BIOS to not see a hard disk.

It still won't see the drive, like no drive connected. The drive is obviously toast, it's just a pursuit of a mystery.

No doubt the drive is damaged, it's just a funky mystery how it failed partially.

Obviously the drive is partially damaged. It's funny how it works perfectly in all respects on a desktop yet not at all in a laptop. It must be the differences in the controllers. Laptop drives puke if you look at them wrong and they are subject to a lot more abuse than 3.5" drives. I now have about 40 failed 2.5" drives.

Thanks for all your help! When I said the laptop won't see the drive, I mean it like it's not there. The BIOS says "no drive connected". A known good drive is recognized and boots fine. Yet this drive works fine on a desktop, must be the differences in controllers, maybe desktop controllers are more robust.

I have images of drives for almost all the laptop models I work on. When I have to replace a drive, I just use Acronis and pre-load the new drive with XP and all the usual application and drivers. Then I only change the keys to the right ones. I'm just starting to get Vista jobs.

WOW, are you OLD!!! I still remember my CP/M home-build with 8" SSSD drives and 64K of memory.

THAT makes PERFECT sense!

Wow, you had a hard drive? I was saving up to buy a 160K floppy drive

Somewhere I still have a full-height 5mb hard drive from a Trash-80

OK, first thing delete all the Bios data, Dell usually has a touchpad or something like that to flatten the Bios, should be same as removing the pswd. The Bios is not seeing what it wants to see, just changing it in setup won't work. Second, Make sure the jumpers on on, and not broken. When you reinstall the drive, make sure the jumpers are on cable select, should work on Master, but Dells can be funny. Third, when the computer recognizes the drive use "FDisk" to remove everything, then use "FDisk MBR" to wipe the master boot record. If its been dropped it won't track the same as it did., so you need to start from the beginning. Then use "FDisk" to reestablish the partitions. gary

Now that platters are glass, they're not good for target practice.

Aha! Look carefully at the drive ID (and the ID setting jumpers). Notebooks will typically only support master (drive #0) on the boot drive connector, and some kinds of drives can be software set or can fail to connect to the cable-select wiring.

If you can put a small bit of wire-wrap wire on the drive terminals, you can bypass the cable-select jumper.

Any sensible non-laptop IDE interface will recognize either ID 0 or ID 1 (master or slave) drives.

Couple questions.

2) What is a 'Master Boot Record'?

--Winston

If the drive worked on the desktop and isn't detected on the laptop, the problem is not the drive. Something in the laptop was damaged by the drop, possibly a cracked board, possibly a connector jarred loose.

If the drive was not tracking the same, the data would not have been accessible on the desktop, and the drive would still be recognized by the BIOS.

Master/Slave setting, maybe?