Hard Disk Drive Not Found

I have a nearly new Inspiron 2200. Microphone input isn't working
right. Dell chat line representative insists on scheduling technician
to replace the motherboard.

Unfortunately, the technician leaves two screws loose when replacing
the mobo. I have the tech come back to fix this mysterious new buzzing
noise.

This time, I make the mistake of handing the laptop to the tech while
it is still in hibernation mode. I do not realize this is a mistake at
the time, but I soon find out. The tech doesn't check the machine's
power status; he immediately removes the motherboard while it is still
in hibernation.

After this, the machine starts acting funky -- primarily freezing
during or shortly after bootup. I try some old familiar fixes, like
Norton Disk Doctor. Nothing helps. Eventually, I discover it is
possible to use the Recover option when booting from the Windows XP
program CD. Inside Recover, I run CHKDSK /R instead of CHKDSK /P,
which I think might have been the better approach.

I run some diagnostics. The Hitachi online rep says the results
indicate that the Dell tech basically trashed the hard drive by
dismantling the system while it was in hibernation mode. Hitachi gives
me an RMA for the drive.

But I really don't want to lose data from that drive. My most recent
backup is several days old. So I play around a bit more.

At this point, the machine is functioning less well. At first, after
the catastropic Dell service call, it would boot into WinXP and then
slow down or freeze. Now it is sometimes not even recognizing the hard
drive on bootup. I look in the BIOS Setup and it says there's no hard
drive. I try booting from the CD and I get the same thing, whether
booting with the WinXP CD, a Knoppix Linux self-contained CD, or a
Hitachi diagnostics CD. The error message I'm getting is this:

internal hard disk drive not found
No bootable devices -- strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup
utility

After the first several boots into WinXP, I am getting this error
message more frequently. This decaying performance seems familiar --
it does seem like the behavior of a failing drive. But I'm not sure it
adds up. If the Dell tech fried the circuits on the drive, it seems
like it would perform at the same level consistently. I am guessing
that dismantling a hibernated machine would not do any surface-level
damage to a drive, of a type that would yield decaying reliability.

I would like to get my data off this hard drive. But the options seem
limited. I don't know how to configure Knoppix to use the laptop's
wireless connection. There's no drive bay for a second drive in the
laptop, to which I could copy the data from the first one; and anyway,
the first one is nonresponsive.

So I buy one of those little adapters that allow you to connect a 2.5"
laptop drive to a regular 3.5" desktop drive cable. I figure maybe the
problem is with the laptop, and this way I can copy my data directly to
a hard drive in the desktop machine.

I put the laptop drive in the desktop machine and play with multiple
ways of plugging it in. The adapter doesn't come with instructions. I
experiment with jumper settings, reverse plug-in options (the adapter
fits the laptop drive both ways), etc. Nothing works. I cannot get
the desktop to recognize the laptop drive. It's not a problem with the
desktop machine. That connector is good; I have a different 3.5" drive
hooked up to it right now. I assume the 2.5" Hitachi drive is acting
this way because this is how it has been acting in the laptop too.

I download some recovery software with a free trial version, I think,
that lets you see the data but not recover it. The software I download
is GetDataBack. I install it on the desktop machine. It, too, fails
to see the 2.5" hard drive.

Tonight, the Dell rep online thinks that maybe the hard drive is not
properly connected to the laptop's motherboard. But would that explain
why the little drive was not working in the desktop machine either? No
connection option seemed to work.

Dell says I may just have to pay a grand for data recovery services.
That'll be the day. I've got a backup that's some days old; I'll have
to be content with using that, and with losing some irreplaceable data.

It just seems strange that, on this very evening, I was able to boot
the laptop into Windows XP Safe Mode and then into Normal mode. I
noticed this same thing previously: if I let the sucker sit for a few
days, it seems to clear its mind and be ready to work again.

Tonight, being cautious, I shut the machine down after both of these
boots, because some newsgroup posting said that this was what someone
else should have done immediately after a similar hibernation screwup:
just do a normal shutdown and reboot. But after it did boot into Safe
and Normal modes, it refused to boot anymore and, once again, it
stopped recognizing the drive.

I was thinking that maybe the solution is to let the thing sit again
for a day or two and then do my first boot with the 2.5" drive
connected to the desktop machine. That way, I might get some life out
of it before it craps out.

At times in the past, I noticed that recalcitrant hard drives seemed to
work better if you let them sit for a while, or when the temperature
cooled down. Sure enough, I have just discovered the "freezer trick":
put the hard drive in a baggie in the freezer for a few hours, and then
recover data from it before it warms up too much. See e.g.,
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp/t1122363710 and
http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/w...um/136644.html

This, I am thinking, may be a way to accelerate the cooling-down
process. I'll do it repeatedly if necessary. That's my next tack,
after finishing this message.

All this talk about the BIOS, in the webpages just cited and elsewhere,
belatedly makes me think that maybe the hard drive was accustomed to
working with the BIOS of the previous motherboard, which I might have
flashed to update it, and maybe they installed a mobo with an older
BIOS that somehow confused the issue. This seems a little vague and
goofy, but since it's probably a good idea to update the laptop's BIOS
anyway, I guess I'll also see if I can figure out how to do that from a
CD drive. (The laptop has no floppy, and that's what Dell's downloads
seem to prefer.)

It may be just as well that the 2.5" drive was unresponsive in the
desktop machine. As I recall, Windows gets confused if you have more
than one Windows program partition in the same machine. So what I
probably should do, after connecting the 2.5" drive to the desktop
machine, is to boot the desktop machine from the CD drive, using either
Knoppix Linux or Drive Image, so as to get the data off without booting
into Windows.

Dell is sending a tech to try to fiddle with the mobo some more, but I
still don't think that's the problem. I've seen several messages
online indicating that the problem in a situation like this is surely
with the hard drive. I really don't want it to be the hard drive.

I see where another guy had this same thing. See
http://tinyurl.com/72fn3. He didn't confirm whether the hard drive was
the problem in that case.

If anyone has any ideas about any of this, I would be very interested
in hearing them. At any rate, I thought it would be prudent to record
the details for future reference by myself and others.