Yea that is not a repair program, it's simply a data recovery. You have to install that on a running machine then browse his drive and get unseen files off of it.
Thats why Vader said to use it if you put the Hard Drive in another machine as a slave and you can't see the drive or files on it. It'll just let you get files that he might want before you start repairs.

Do not try to install that or anything on his system, if the boot sector has gone bad you might write over files he may want/need. Even reinstalling windows, would be risky at this point becasue it's going to create a new boot sector somewhere on the drive and it could be on top of data.

Unless he has everything he needs/wants already backed up and is sure there is nothing on it he might lose that he wants.
If that is the case then use a windows disk to boot, fdisk and delete everything, format, and do aclean install.

Well if you get to help him before someone else does, good luck.

 

great advice

 

He dropped the HD off, I took the one out of my external HD enclosure and put his in, once all hooked up it is not seen anywhere. I tried the install new HW deal but nothing. I hooked mine back up and there it is.

It seems to fire up, I can feel it spinning, but just can't find it anywhere.

maybe there is nothing on it.

Where would one go from here, try reinstall the OS?

 

Did you switch the jumper to slave?

If it's still set as master then it probably won't show up.

If it is set to slave and it's still not showing up anywhere, then the drive is either unformated or toast.
Then you could try to run that restorer2000 program and do a scan to see if any of his files turn up. If they do then it has likley lost it's format. So then it's a reformat and new OS install.
So then have to decide if he wants any of those files or not. Because when you format it to get it ready for the OS, then it will become harder to recover any of the files, and after OS install it is a slim chance of recovery becasue they have been over written with the new data.

 

i changed the jumper, and even took it completly off. That is how the HD that I have in the enclosure is set and it works fine with out the jumper.

when I go to my computer on my laptop (XP Home) it won't show up anywhere, like it is not even hoked up. Put mine back in and it shows me the 3 partitions that are on it. i can open and explore all of them, but nothing on his HD.

thanks for the help guys, i appreciate it.

 

Can you see the HDD in the bios? If you can try this

If this isnt a ME machine - Insert your OS CD into the CD-ROM and allow setup to begin. At the Welcome to Setup screen press 'R' to open the Recovery Console.

This should open a command window.

At the command prompt type: fixmbr and press Enter

Also put the jumper on CS (cable select) unless you have a really old chipset setting to CS will rule out any Master/slave issues. Also if there is another drive on this IDE channel (assuming its not a SATA drive) make sure its set to CS as well. I bet its just a config issue. In 20 years, I have only had 2 or 3 drive "go out".

Has anyone change anything right before its stopped working - like changed the BIOS or added a drive or set the current partition to inactive or set a non OS partition to active?

 

I don't think he would know how to get into anything to change anything that would foul it up.

From what he told me, and we all know how that goes, he shut it down the night before and the next day got the OS not found message.

 

If that is honestly how it went then its probably a good old fashioned hdd going bad scenario - usually the boot sector goes first. The filesystem is probably still ok. You may even be able to ghost it to a new drive.

If he needs data off it you can daisychain it to another pcs HDD and pull the files off it.

Just go get a new drive and reload the machine. Put the "bad" drive on the other IDE channel or slave it so you can still get to the data, granted the FS is ok. Im guessing it probably is.