Hard drive no longer seen in BIOS

[pazzaar]

Hi!

Yesterday my desktop computer began to freeze up, and services began randomly shutting down (e.g. the audio service just stopped, I couldn't CTRL+ALT+DELETE). I figured I should just restart it, and upon restarting it I was greeted with the message 'no bootable device found'. The drive is no longer detected in the BIOS

Now I've gone through a lot of troubleshooting and I've determined its a harddrive issue - my laptop harddrive works fine connected to the desktop's motherboard.

I bought a SATA to USB adapter, and have hooked up my HDD to my laptop. The hard drive spins up, it sounds fine (not making any strange clicking noise), but its not detected. Whenever I plug in the adapter the windows noise plays, and it recognizes a 'USB mass storage device', but I'm fairly certain thats windows simply recognizing the USB adapter device - not the HDD.

My question is this: is my hard drive screwed? Or can I take any steps to recover my data? It's got some relatively important stuff on it and I didn't expect it just to conk out without any warning. I've not had hard drive issues in the past. As far as I'm aware once the harddrive is no longer detectable in the BIOS its screwed.

The harddrive is an extremely bog standard WD 1 TB 3.5 inch SATA thingy, and I'm on Windows 7

 

[Zerk2012]

Hard drives can just go out anytime. You should always have important data backed up.

 

[pazzaar]

So, I've made a tiny bit of headway

When I run windows repair through a bootable USB, and just click 'repair', the computer will restart and give me a weird error message, telling me that 'The Windows Boot Configuration Data file does not contain a valid OS entry'. This then puts the PC in a reboot loop.

BUT! When I enter the bios, by pressing F12, the hard drive is now listed as one of the boot options! I select that to boot from, and it gives me the same error... great.

To make matters worse, when I hard reset the computer, it gives the same error message, and the HDD has vanished from the BIOS options.

 

[Zerk2012]

I would try the drive in anouther PC and see if you can get your important data off of it before going much futher since you cant loose it.

 

[pazzaar]

I would try the drive in anouther PC and see if you can get your important data off of it before going much futher since you cant loose it.

Unfortunately I don't have another computer to try it on. But I do have the SATA-USB adapter on my laptop, where the drive doesn't work.

 

[jason201]

If you ask me, it's very likely that your HDD has a problem with it's PCB (printed circuit board)
and these are usually easy to fix. There are multiple sites where you can purchase a spare (and compatible) PCB from.
Such as these:

https://www.onepcbsolution.com
https://www.hddzone.com
there's also ebay and aliexpress.

Each PCB has it's identification number, and you should refer to the following guide in order to determine what it is:
https://www.hddzone.com/conditions.html
Most HDDs use T8 (torx) screws for the PCB, so you may need to purchase a special screwdriver for this task (unless you already own some kind of screwdriver bit set which has it). Anyways, in most cases, swapping the PCB alone would not do the trick (typically, a chip swap would also be required, in order to match up the firmware of the drive).
The first site I've mentioned (onepcbsolution) offers this service free of charge (you purchase your PCB, send em your existing one, they swap out the firmware chip, and send it back to you) so if you can find your particular PCB in there, I think that would be best. Otherwise, you'd have to take it to a local electronics repair store and have them do it.
If you're not sure about the chip's location, you could ask on the site you're purchasing it from, or simply look it up on ebay or aliexpress, typically, the sellers would circle it in red on the picture. Anyways, Good luck!

 

[pazzaar]

If you ask me, it's very likely that your HDD has a problem with it's PCB (printed circuit board)
and these are usually easy to fix. There are multiple sites where you can purchase a spare (and compatible) PCB from.
Such as these:

https://www.onepcbsolution.com
https://www.hddzone.com
there's also ebay and aliexpress.

Each PCB has it's identification number, and you should refer to the following guide in order to determine what it is:
https://www.hddzone.com/conditions.html
Most HDDs use T8 (torx) screws for the PCB, so you may need to purchase a special screwdriver for this task (unless you already own some kind of screwdriver bit set which has it). Anyways, in most cases, swapping the PCB alone would not do the trick (typically, a chip swap would also be required, in order to match up the firmware of the drive).
The first site I've mentioned (onepcbsolution) offers this service free of charge (you purchase your PCB, send em your existing one, they swap out the firmware chip, and send it back to you) so if you can find your particular PCB in there, I think that would be best. Otherwise, you'd have to take it to a local electronics repair store and have them do it.
If you're not sure about the chip's location, you could ask on the site you're purchasing it from, or simply look it up on ebay or aliexpress, typically, the sellers would circle it in red on the picture. Anyways, Good luck!

Ok, that sounds like a sweet idea! I was thinking it could be the PCB, as I've seen several youtube videos where people remove the board and give all the connections a clean. I'm thinking I might give cleaning them a try, and then order a spare PCB if that doesn't work (I've gone ahead and order some torx screwdrivers as I don't own a set). I live in the UK so I'll have a look for some places that are a bit more local.

One thing I was unsure about was how to identify if its a PCB problem. If the harddrive spins up (which mine still does) can it still be a PCB problem? (Sorry for my noobiness!)

 

[Ubrales]

As others have stated, I suggest you save whatever data is on the HDD - To do this: 1) Do a complete backup. 2) Clone the HDD to another identical (preferred) good HDD. 3) Use the cloned HDD to do data recovery. 4) Do a complete backup (again). 5) Do complete backups on a weekly basis (or on a more frequent basis).

 

[pazzaar]

As others have stated, I suggest you save whatever data is on the HDD - To do this: 1) Do a complete backup. 2) Clone the HDD to another identical (preferred) good HDD. 3) Use the cloned HDD to do data recovery. 4) Do a complete backup (again). 5) Do complete backups on a weekly basis (or on a more frequent basis).

Unfortunately I can't actually access the hard drive in any capacity. I'm just looking to recover the data, not completely fix the hard drive

 

[jason201]

If you ask me, it's very likely that your HDD has a problem with it's PCB (printed circuit board)
and these are usually easy to fix. There are multiple sites where you can purchase a spare (and compatible) PCB from.
Such as these:

https://www.onepcbsolution.com
https://www.hddzone.com
there's also ebay and aliexpress.

Each PCB has it's identification number, and you should refer to the following guide in order to determine what it is:
https://www.hddzone.com/conditions.html
Most HDDs use T8 (torx) screws for the PCB, so you may need to purchase a special screwdriver for this task (unless you already own some kind of screwdriver bit set which has it). Anyways, in most cases, swapping the PCB alone would not do the trick (typically, a chip swap would also be required, in order to match up the firmware of the drive).
The first site I've mentioned (onepcbsolution) offers this service free of charge (you purchase your PCB, send em your existing one, they swap out the firmware chip, and send it back to you) so if you can find your particular PCB in there, I think that would be best. Otherwise, you'd have to take it to a local electronics repair store and have them do it.
If you're not sure about the chip's location, you could ask on the site you're purchasing it from, or simply look it up on ebay or aliexpress, typically, the sellers would circle it in red on the picture. Anyways, Good luck!

Ok, that sounds like a sweet idea! I was thinking it could be the PCB, as I've seen several youtube videos where people remove the board and give all the connections a clean. I'm thinking I might give cleaning them a try, and then order a spare PCB if that doesn't work (I've gone ahead and order some torx screwdrivers as I don't own a set). I live in the UK so I'll have a look for some places that are a bit more local.

One thing I was unsure about was how to identify if its a PCB problem. If the harddrive spins up (which mine still does) can it still be a PCB problem? (Sorry for my noobiness!)

Well, in your particular case, it's difficult to say for sure (as it could also be a firmware level corruption)
That said, the PCB has many components on it, and any failure in that component chain may cause issues.
A lot of people assume that an electronic device can either work 100% or not at all, but there are definitely middle grounds. You can't really determine how a component failure would affect the device. In some cases, it may not work at all, while in others, it can cause reduced functionality. So just because the drive spins, it doesn't necessarily mean that the PCB is fully functional. And in terms of cost, replacing the PCB is way cheaper than professional data recovery, so you should definitely give that a go. And as said before, if you can find your PCB on onepcbsolution, that would be best (as they'd be making the firmware chip swap for free!), but if you order it elsewhere, it's not gonna be too pricey to have it replaced locally on an electronics repair shop.

 

[Ubrales]

As others have stated, I suggest you save whatever data is on the HDD - To do this: 1) Do a complete backup. 2) Clone the HDD to another identical (preferred) good HDD. 3) Use the cloned HDD to do data recovery. 4) Do a complete backup (again). 5) Do complete backups on a weekly basis (or on a more frequent basis).

Unfortunately I can't actually access the hard drive in any capacity. I'm just looking to recover the data, not completely fix the hard drive

Try 'RECUVA' on another computer. Recover your data and then trash the HDD.