Thread: Vanishing HDD

I have always enjoyed reviews of PC hardware in every issue of your magazine. I purchased a SEAGATE 500GB SATA hard disk on November 2008.My PC config is P4 3.0 Ghz,lGB DDR RAM,80GB Seagate HOD. I then added the new 500GB hard disk to my Pc. My previous HOD is a standard IDE hatch" disk. It seemed fine for a couple of weeks. But now when I turn on the PC, it shows only the old HOD. I reinstalled the HOD but to no avail. I then used Paragon partition manager. It states that the HOD cannot undergo Read and Write process .... please help me. What should I do, guys?

This 500 GB SATA hard disk might not be showing up in your "My Computer" list of drives for a number of reasons. I'm assuming that you mean to say that you re-connected the £ATA and power cables to the HOD's ports when you say "I re-installed the HOD". I'm also assuming that your new HOD is not really dead, since Pamgon Partition Masenger is able to see it and throws up an error message. So this would mean that your HOD is fine on the hardware side of things, and just needs a bit of data recovery and re-partitioning.

I suggest that the first thing you should do, is to confirm if the OS can "see" the HOD by going to Device Manager and look under Disk Drives to see if both your HODs are listed there. The next step is to check whether the HOD has been set to be "read-only" by any chance, whether from the BIOS, or via a jumper setting on the HOD itself. Then make your data safe by using data recovery software, either from our DVD this month (Handy Recovery) or download a similar app from the Internet. Lastly, bring the drive back to usability by removing all partitions, re-creating and formatting them for use with the OS. You need a partitioning tool for this. Use the free PartEd Magic 3.0 from our September 2008 DVD, or any similar software that you trust. Need¬less to say, if all else fails, ask your vendor to make good on the five year warranty provided by Seagate.