A few years ago as my Win98 machine was filling up I purchased a Western Digital WD400 drive with the objective of copying the w98 operating system over to the drive using the WD datalifeguard software supplied. Halfway through the process something went wrong and it stopped. When I tried to start over nothing would work. If I configure the drive a slave then it locks my system up when it reboots. I've tried connecting it to my system using a USB to IDE interface that I have but whereever I place the jumpers the drive is not recognised so I can't recover it.

When I power the drive up it spins away nice a quietly so I suspect that all is well but I would dearly love to recover the drive.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Is the drive seen properly in the BIOS?

(e.g. WD400BB-00CFA0 etc) and as proper size?

I have a jumper in slave position and it doesn't appear in the bios

Try it on another machine or in USB enclosure.

Yes if i remove the jumper pins (so it is a master), connect it to the master IDE cable then it appears in the bios as a 40MB drive but it doesn't display the drive make type etc - or I can't see it, but it doesn't go on to boot up - obviously because the formatting failed when I originally tried to do it with lifeguard.

What can I do to fully format it?

Thanks for your help

Like Starling says, stick it in USB box and connect it to a working PC.

Make sure it's set to master.

If the drive is OK, windows will pick it up and you can initialise, partition and format in XP administrative tools.

Also try the WD diagnostics, they now have one that runs in Windows, it will either fix the drive & re-format it for you or will give you an error code which you can look up on their website.

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I think ST is a sub company of Lucas

I couldnt agree more

try this

put the drive in another pc and see if its detected, it may be the ide cable you are using is faulty

_________________
GEORGE NJOROGE
EAST AFRICAN DATA HANDLERS LTD
http://WWW.datarecovery.co.ke
Chiromo court chiromo road, Westlands
Nairobi Kenya
+254-20-3751400/2/7

Did u try checking hdd with MHDD or Victoria ?