When I turn on my old computer, it tells me that my hard drive is missing. Help.?

Question

The other drives are working, have ran a startup disc and it tells me that the C drive is missing. If I try and change from D drive to C it will not change. How can I fix this problem? Any and all help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

hard drive died have it replaced... really nothing else you can do

Answer 2

This can be a couple of problems.

1) Go into the BIOS and make sure the on-board hard driver controller is enabled. Someone maybe you turned it off by accident.

2) The hard drive ribbon cable may have come loose for either the motherboard or the hard drive. Check both to make sure they are connected properly.

3) There is no power connection to the drive. Check and make sure the power connection from the power supply to the hard drive is not loose or dis-connected.

4) If there is an add-on hard drive card make sure it is seated properly, and the cables are connected properly.

5) Chances are the hard drive had its final days. In this case the only option is to replace the drive unit.

Answer 3

Two choices:
1. Replace hard drive and operating system.
2. Attempt a recovery. I just recently did a recovery by putting the Bad hard drive, with the jumper switches set to slave, in another computer with XP. When you reboot the repairing computer, it will probably do a check disk by itself. However, to run the check disk, type "chkdsk /f" and then return at a command prompt. You will be able to tell that the bad hard drive has been repaired, by check disk, because you will be able to read and access files on the repair computer. After repair, reinstall the repaired hard drive in the original computer, but rememeber to reset the jumper settings back to master.

Answer 4

first, check to make sure that the drive is connected properly by removing the side cover and visually inspecting the IDE connector cable on the hard drive cable end and motherboard cable end. if everything looks good and still won't boot, try booting from CD and doing a repair install (if Windows)
if you get a command prompt for D:\> and can't switch to C:\>, or do a fdisk /r c: then your drive may have took a shite on you.

Answer 5

The place to start is to make sure all the connections are still good. Especially if the computer was bumped or moved recently. I had this happen when me moved the computer to another room.

Answer 6

HI!!!
LOOK , YOU NEED TO OPEN THE CPU, LOOK INSIDE IF THE HARD DRIVE IS CONNECTED PROPERTY (there are 2 cables the big one goes to the mother board and the small one goes to the electricity supply) IF EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED OK, LOOK IN THE SAME PLACE WHERE CABLES ARE (in the hard drive ok?) AND THERE YOU'LL SEE A SMALL PIECE OF PLASTIC CALLED "JUMPER", IT MUST BE PLUG IN ON "MASTER" IF IT IS ON "SLAVE OR CS" IS WRONG OK?? GOOD LUCK!!!

Answer 7

i Think it's most likely that your hard drive is broken. or maybe the cable is not plugged properly. U should check it.