My Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS is no longer recognized in the BIOS.
[Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit, GIGABYTE GA-P35-S3G LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard]

I had experienced some boot errors a couple weeks ago. I thought it was related to a possible trojan activated by firefox, which probably wiped out some system files and drivers. Back then I booted to my Vista CD to run through a repair process and get things working again. I uninstalled firefox and scanned computer for viruses, nothing was found. Had not used Firefox for awhile and encountered no further problems. Installed a download of a newer Firefox and didn't see any problems until: Couple days ago though my computer was hanging upon returning from sleep/standby mode. I was not able to reboot successfully. This time rebooting with the Vista disk and trying to run through the repair process did not work. There was no existing windows isntallation or hard drive to choose from.

I went into the BIOS and saw it was not detected anymore. I was able to get to a command prompt at one point (don't recall how) and did a 'cd c: dir/w' and was able to view all the contents of the drive. I opened up my tower and pulled the HD out and powered up the computer and was able to hear the HD power up and sounded like it was spinning.

I have another identical drive (different contents), and I tried swapping the SATA cables, but that made no difference. I still couldn't auto-detect in the bios. Because I needed to have my computer operational, I installed windows onto my other hard-drive. Now I can't browse the file contents through a command prompt as I was able to before. My funcitonal hard drive used to be labeled as the B: drive while the non-working one was C: The functional one is now labeled C:, so I don't know if that is preventing me from viewing it that way.

My main concern is trying to get some of the data off the drive that didn't get backed up yet. I can live without the drive being functional again. I did see this post (seagate-barracuda-7200-please-help-t15380.html#p100854), but was hoping since I was able to still browse contents through cmd at one point, that maybe I've just created some conflict after installing Windows to the other drive and need to do something master/slave wise or who knows.

Thanks a ton!

-Ryan

[bump]

Anyone? Thanks.

The contents of your drive will not affect whether it shows in BIOS or not

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

Yes, but I was just sharing that, indicating my data was hopefully still there. I am trying to get help to get my data off there one way or the other, and hopefully the details provided gives someone a clue.

Thanks.

Download MHDD or Victoria and see if that software can detect it. Diagnostic software like this can bypass the BIOS.

You can use the computer terminal and the COM line to a super fix it.