Hard Drive missing

[Hidenori Iijima]

Laptop is working normally except when I tried to restore from a backup image or reformat or reinstall windows, it does not recognize the hard drive. I updated the bios, changed hard drive, it does not find it. From bios menu, I checked the hard drive, it seems to be working (quick test is OK). What can I do?

[Sheldon Smith]

Sounds like one or more critical sectors, like in the partition table, have more errors than the disk firmware can handle.

Go to http://grc.com/spinrite and get a copy of SpinRite. Put the laptop somewhere it can run without overheating. Boot up SpinRite and let it run.

One last question: Is there something physically wrong with the drive? Does it rattle? If something has actually broken inside, replace the drive.

[Hidenori Iijima]

Thanks for your suggestion to look at. I found the problem was SATA drive. I tried to install a SATA driver from A: floppy Drive during the installation of Window XP Pro. After installation of SATA driver, Windows asks to insert Windows CD in Drive A:!!!!. I also tried NLite to merge the driver into Windows CD, but it did not work (I may have done something wrong). I did not have too much time, so I disabled native SATA feature and finished the job.