Friends Dell laptop, of course he does no backups, WD 500 Gb HD has gone bad, chkdsk throws errors for hours if you let it, and of course it can't boot.
I have an identical size Toshiba drive pulled from a machine that went to scrap, test it in my desktop, it's fine and chkdsk says it has no errors. Plug that into the Dell, you can hear it spin up and the heads load...and...nothing...the Dell BIOS insists there is no HD in the machine. wtf....? Not sure how the Toshiba is formatted, but guessing NTFS as I can even see all the files when connected to the desktop...but the Dell doesn't even think it's a physical drive, but the Dell has no problem seeing the screwed up WD HD...so it's not the interface. Ideas ?
I have an identical size Toshiba drive pulled from a machine that went to scrap, test it in my desktop, it's fine and chkdsk says it has no errors. Plug that into the Dell, you can hear it spin up and the heads load...and...nothing...the Dell BIOS insists there is no HD in the machine. wtf....? Not sure how the Toshiba is formatted, but guessing NTFS as I can even see all the files when connected to the desktop...but the Dell doesn't even think it's a physical drive, but the Dell has no problem seeing the screwed up WD HD...so it's not the interface. Ideas ?