"Lost" Hard Drive Completed

[Zeb]

All I can suggest is to make sure the IDE ribbon cable is plugged in properly. If it is, unplug it and plug it back in (from motherboard and from the drive itself) and see if that sorts the problem out.

Drives don't last forever and there's a possibility that the drive itself has died or (even worse) the IDE controller on the motherboard has died.

How old is the machine?

You can buy IDE drives now at silly prices (I bought 1TB for £50) so it might be worth trying a new drive (I get most of my components from ebuyer.com) and if that doesn't fix it, might mean something worse. Don't forget to try a replacement ribbon cable if possible. If it doesn't turn out to be the drive and you've bought a replacement one it can always be plugged into a new PC as a slave drive.

[Roger The Hat]

Thanks, Zeb,

I've left it as it is, i.e. a 40gb drive formatted FAT32, and working, with no apparent problems.

As I said previously, the drive wouldn't install XP following several attempts, on either my friend's 4 year old machine, or my relatively new machine, with new cables, trying to format it NTFS.

I think it's one of those problems that isn't going to have a logical answer.