Windows killed my Amiga hard drive, can I recover?

[Stedy]

Hi,

I guess the topic says it all.

I plugged my 1.4 Gig 2.5" IDE hdd into my PC to try and read the data into WinUAE. It was recognised by the PC BIOS/Windows XP on the first boot. I tried to access it via WinUAE but to no avail, I rebooted and the PC hung at POST. I removed the drive and the PC booted.

I can not get this drive to be recognised by the Amiga or a PC. It spins up but that is all.

Is it possible that something wrote a bad value into the IDE control registers? Do they have a FLASH/EEPROM on a HDD?

Any suggestions or help appreciated.

[Karlos]

I've only ever accessed amiga formatted HD;s with win2K. I don't trust XP as far as I can throw a fullsize tower running it.

I find it unlikely however, that the drive can have been damaged just by attaching it, unless you had some unfortunate power spike or something else weird.

You say it was a 2.5 inch drive? How did you connect it? I know that 2.5 inch drives are typically powered through their IDE cable (44 lines, 4 of which are for power IIRC). If you had the cable inserted the wrong way somehow, is it possible you fed current through the wrong pins?

Then again, if it was recognised by windows, I guess that is not a possibility.

Sorry, this isn't helpful, is it?

[Doobrey]

Stedy wrote:
Do they have a FLASH/EEPROM on a HDD?

Some drives have upgradable firmware, best bet is to visit the drive manufacturers website and see if they have any diagnostic tools you can download.
 But, that does mean getting the PC to boot up with the drive installed first :-(

I know some older 2.5" drives liked to be the only device on the cable, maybe try putting it as the only one on the secondary port?

Can you get into the BIOS with the drive plugged in to do a redetect?

[voytech]

do you use a desktop or laptop, maybe its the 2.5"->3.5" reducer

[Stedy]

Hi,

A bit more information.

I used a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE converter in a desktop PC. The IDE drive was the only device on IDE chain #2 of my PC.

I can not get to the BIOS screen with this drive plugged in! Arse!

I used some software to detect the drive, I think that may have done the damage, I can not find the name of this software at the present time.

I will look on the Hitachi website for some tools, the drive is a Hitachi DK221 IIRC.

Thanks for the advice so far.

Ian

[Thomas]

You should plug the drive into your Amiga and check if HDToolbox sees it. If it sees the drive, you can use a recovery tool like RDB-Salv or RDBRecov to recover the data.

If the drive is not recognised by HDToolbox, it's probably dead.

If your PC freezes with the drive attached, you have no chance to recover this way. Because the best you get from the manufacturer's homepage is a DOS boot disk with some tools on it. If you can't boot, the disk is useless.

Bye,
Thomas

[voytech]

 Well that could work, but only if you backed up your RDB..
I remember, that for some time I used damaged Caviar, that didn't work with a PC, and did work fine with my Ami - it had  a bad block on sect 0, PC couldn't write the MBR on it, and on my Ami I moved RDB on some other sector, same way you make an AMI/PC hdd hybrid, and it worked..

[Emufreak]

If nothing else helps. You could try to replace the electronics of your harddrive. I was successfull with that once. See also this site: www.deadharddrive.com

[AmiGR]

No, RDBSalv can create the RDB by itself, it scans the entire disk for FFS and PFS bootblocks.

[jlariv8957]

Hi,

I think the problem is due to the windows disk manager who writes it's own signature to access the drive and erase the RDB, but as far as i know the disk manager ask a question before writing anything on the disk. I've often use an amiga hard disk on a PC with WINUAE without any problem !

You should use utilities that have been advised by other users !