Stewart Ferguson wrote:

First post here...

My brother-in-law gave me a spare 40GB Maxtor Fireball 3. I was to install
it on my daughters computer. Unfortunately while he was formatting it he
accidentally switched the computer off at the mains. The drive is no
longer detected by the BIOS. I have downloaded software from Maxtor with
no success. I have tried it as a master and a slave on my computer. No
success.

Any other suggestions...

Thanks in advance,

Stewart

I didn't know cutting power during format can cause this. And it seems
rather strange too, because all a format does is blanking data and creating
a file system. I got a feeling that your problem is caused by something
else.

If it did cause your problem, the only sollution I can think of, is doing a
low level format, but that is kind of dangerous. And I don't know if that
works when the BIOS doesn't detect it. I think so, because I believe a low
level format is what makes the sectors, cylinders and so forth, which the
bios detects, but I'm not sure.

Use it only as a last resort. Tools should be available from several
hard-disk manufacturers. Maxtors provides one I believe.

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