If you can boot and F10 to the Bios, and if Hitachi is like HP, there'll be a disk diagnostic you can run...will tell you if it's a hard disk failure.

You have recovery disks, right? and a backup of your hard disk?

There are tests (antiviral/trojan, etc.) you should run on your backups too, before putting them on any replacement disk.

P.S. Good luck!   And maybe you should be calling Hitachi tech support?

hi dr

i have tried everything and double checked but the drive wont come up - if i put it internal the pc wont boot. when i put it as usb it says drive "unkown and unreadable" - to make matters worse i have 2 of these hitachi deskstar and both are doing the same thing. its really a pain coz i cannot access anything on either. i tried restoring with back up but its useless. maybe i should bash them both with a hammer  lol

have just tried datadoctor and that cannot read it either tho it did list it

i dont use the hitachis at the same time - the first i changed coz it was unknown etc and now this other one doing the same thing, everything was fine then suddenly the vista boot up indicator just kept going and going and no access.

its driven me crazy, hitachi say run a diagnostic but as soon as i plug it in to pc the computer wont boot at all. it has all my artwork and stuff on it and i spent 11 hours the other day just 2 get the pc to start - using a maxtor. i have it as a usb drive but no luck - unknown/unreadable.

i have tried shuffling them from sata i thru sata 4 - no joy, the diagnostic wont run coz software not compatable - oh the joy of it.

List your system specs.

I wouldn't trust a deskstar to host my recycle bin... As you've noticed, they are majorly unreliable. Most harddrives tend to start sounding funny, and cause minor issues before failing... Deskstars just die, they don't have the nickname deathstars for nothing.

Experience tells me you're out of luck when it comes to getting the data out of the drives yourself. Your case *may* be different though, it's hard to tell, as we don't have physical access to check your stuff.

Obviously most drives work well for years, even those with a bad reputation. I've seen a HUGE lot of broken deskstars at work (a 600 computer company) where most computers worked fine (pretty much all the computers had deskstars, as hardware was standardized), there was a continuous stream of harddrive failures though, something like 5 each week or so... Drives that decided to just die at some point... We started switching the drives to western digital (which was seen as reliable drives at the time), and after a few months, we noted that drive failure rate went down do about 5 each month instead... That's why I don't trust deskstar.

There was still hundreds of deskstars running just fine when I left the company though.

Well, there was still a huge lot of deskstars around to fail, I would think the company I worked for got down to the more normal failure rates after getting rid of even more or those evil ones. I didn't stay long enough to see a month go by without a single harddrive failure on any of the 600 computers that was up and running.

There is only ONE tool that will fix this....... it's called "Spinrite". Google it........ you won't be disappointed.

Good Luck!

OK, so IBM/Hitachi have acknowledged issues with some of their drives, some more than others, but in loukeeya's case she says there were no early warning signs, just that the the drives just ceased to be read by the BOIS and Vista at boot.  It may be that the Hitachi drives have had the biscuit, but it just seems strange that a Maxtor is also affected when mounted internally, which suggests there is another probable cause... unless the Hitachi took down the mobo, SATA connections when it died, meaning no drives will run when mounted internally.

Hmmm... the thot plickens.

According to this...

.. the issue is with both the Maxtor and the Hitachi's... suggesting to me that the mobo/BIOS is having difficulty reading drives mounted internally but can see the Maxtor when mounted as a USB, although the data on it appears to be inaccessible.

Funny thing, my sister rang me a short while ago to say she is experiencing a similar thing (no, not the one with the Deskstar) with her old rig... when she powers up it just screams at her and she has to turn it off. She's talking about finding the cause and getting it fixed, but I don't fancy her chances as it has a 939 socket AMD CPU and mobo, and you just can't get those here in Oz anymore.

Fortunately, my mother gave her her PC to my sister when she went to the UK to live, which I rebuilt/upgraded and formatted with Vista Ultimate for her, so she has a working PC to keep her going.

Loukeeya, what exactly was the problem? Was it ever diagnosed? What did yrag say?

So happy you're back!