Recently my sisters system began to slow down dramatically (most likely due to a virus), until one day it wouldn't boot at all because it couldn't find a hard drive on her system. I reconnected all the cables, which didn't work, so I took it over to my system thinking it might be a bad cable, but it wasn't, and so a friend loaned me an internal HDD to external HDD. After I plugged in the USB cable, I was notified that a Mass Storage Device had been connected, so I went to My Computer and it wasn't there. I checked in Device Manager, however, and it said it was working fine. I couldn't see it in Disk Management, so after looking around for solutions, I found that when I went into my registry, went to Mounted Devices and found the "DosDevice" that said "U.S.B.S.T.O..." (USB storage) and renamed it with another drive letter, I could see it in Disk Management. I was then able to see it in My Computer. When I tried to click on it, though, it said there was an I/O device error. Since it was 2:00am and I had already fixed another unrelated problem on another computer that certain people *cough* had neglected to mention until 10:00pm, I went to bed figuring I would use data recovery software to try to save as much data as I could from the hard drive. However, when I got up this morning and went to work on it, I could no longer see it in My Computer (though I could see it in Device Manager), hence I went to the registry to try what I had done earlier. Except, U.S.B.S.T.O.... was no longer there. I have older versions of my registry that don't help at all, and neither does using System Restore. At this point I'm back to square one. I'm betting this hard drive is simply screwed and trying to get anything off it without going to a recovery specialist is a lost cause =P. If anyone could help with this it would be greatly appreciated. The system I'm trying to fix it on is Windows XP Pro w/ Service Pack 3, and the hard drive in question is an IDE 20GB Western Digital Protege. I've tried using different jumper configurations, but to no avail.
Thanks.
Thanks.