Can't access hard drive, need advice!

[tazzmissionx]

Here is the situation. I am trying to retrieve information from a customers hard drive, so I connect it up to my computer. BIOS sees the hard drive, XP sees hard drive in Device Manager but is not accessible through My Computer. Disk Management sees the drive as healthy and I noticed that it is a 160GB FAT32 XP partition (WTF). The only option Disk Management gives you is to delete the partition. The hard drive is not bootable either.

Any ideas on how I can access this hard drive or does it seem that something is messed up that is preventing me from accessing the hard drive.

 

[NeoGohan]

Hmmm I thought if disk management read it as healthy, your computer would be able to read it. There's no option to import foreign disk or anything? If it's a pata drive, play with the jumpers. Take it off CS or Slave and try to set it to Master. See if that works. Otherwise I'm not really sure what else it could be.

 

[fx9]

Burn a Knoppix live linux cd and boot it up. If that can't see it, its probably hardware related. Plug it into another computer and see if it works?

 

[Dangman]

Try using Knoppix Live CD (V.5.1 I think, not the DVD version) to see if you can access the drive.

 

[tazzmissionx]

Just an update, I am using file recovery software to see what I can get off the drive.

 

[sram]

Use some wd tools to diagnose the drive

 

[LurkerLito]

Last time I had issues where a Windows based system couldn't read a hard drive, I booted up a linux boot disc and got back 98% of the data. So always have a linux boot CD available IMO.

 

[tazzmissionx]

Final update, I managed to get the customers files off the hard drive through software.