Hi,
I have used MHDD software before, and it worked ok. However i have just downloaded the new version, burnt it to dvd and booted it on a laptop with a SATA drive. I selected the HDD disk controler (6) and pressed F4 for a scan.

The problem is it just sits their and will not start to scan the drive.

Any advice please.

Is something wrong with the HDD in your laptop?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

THe reason i am checking it is that i keep getting a message ""No operating system found". I have had to re-install the Boot.ini file a few times, and i think the hard drive might be going faulty.

Unfortunately that error message can have more than one possible cause, but some things you could do to help confirm a disk hardware problem include (assuming you use Windows):

- In the laptop BIOS, set the SATA HDD controller into IDE or compatibility mode (if this is not the current selection), when booting the MHDD CD. That might allow you to use MHDD to scan the drive.

- Use a manufacturer-specific Windows diagnostics (e.g. Seagate Seatools or WD DLG), since there have been cases where these confirm faults, where general utils do not.

- Use a good general utility (e.g. HDDScan) to read the disk, run standard SMART tests, and review the current SMART attribute raw values.

- Look for disk-related errors in the Windows System Event Log, during the times when Windows is bootable.

etc.

So your current situation is not a dead-end. Also, bear in mind that a diagnostic test "pass" does not prove that no fault exists.

Has your laptop been slow and sometimes freezing or something along those lines?
Whenever you reinstalled boot.ini, did the system attempt to run checkdisk on the drive?

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Hard Disk Drive, SSD, USB Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

sound to us that your drive might have to many bad sectors at the begging of the drive so its loosing the windows partitions
or something has gone wrong with the smart on the drive



the error code you are getting would not stop mhdd from working as that just a os

Hi,
The laptop has a Phoenix bios, and does not give me any options to change the controller settings.

@Cyberdog:

Therefore MHDD might not work correctly, and that could explain the issue which you reported initially. All my other suggestions still apply, if you are going to investigate this yourself.

Does your drive show in MHDD's list? Are you able to hit F2 to ID? If so, what does it display?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

@drc:
I was wondering if the SATA controller in the laptop was wrongly being detected as supported by MHDD, when actually it wasn't (I've seen that before on a laptop) - but that caused all MHDD commands to hang, so your ID test sounds like a very good plan in this case

I will get back to you on that point.

Thanks
Dave.