I have a Dell XPS 420 with two WD Caviar SE16 500GB SATA drives in it. Last Thursday night everything was working fine. Friday the system wouldn’t boot. I kept getting a error “'Error sensing secondary master hard drive”. It turned out that the drive with the OS/Boot partition on it was bad because dell sent me a new drive. After I pulled the bad drive out and replaced it with the new one the system booted right up after the OS completed it’s unattended setup.

I was really happy until I logged in and found out that some of my data was evidently not on the Data drive but the OS drive. Ya know, things like my Quicken data and and god know swhat else that I screwed up and didn’t pay attention to. To make matters even worse, I’ve not been as good about backing up the OS drive because it, I thought, didn’t have anything really important on it that I couldn’t just reload/rebuild.

The drive is powering up and it doesn’t make any of the bad sounds that you associate with the bearings being gone or heads having crashed therefore I initially just suspected that it might have lost the partition info. I downloaded a couple of programs to try and see what I could see from the “Disk Doctor”, “DTI Data” and “CBL Data Recovery” websites. I also run the Dell DIAG’s to see if that might tell me something.

When I ran the Dell Diags, the good HD showed up with the HDD Serial #. The bad HDD didn’t show a serial # and even the confidence test errored out. The CBL Data Recovery software couldn’t/wouldn’t see the drive at all. The drive would spin up on boot-up and then kind go dormant like it wasn’t being accessed. At one point, I had the bad HDD connected to the system using a SATA to USB connector to look at using one of the programs and it showed the drive via the USB connection but the firmware revision info and sector info was hosed.

The system has an UPS on it but the night before everything went KAPUT we did have some brown outs etc.

I’m starting the think that the only option left is to send it out to a big house for recovery. What are yalls thoughts about options? Anyone have any thoughts on what the issue is with the drive based on your past experience and what I might expect the ballpark price will be to recover the info?

Tks

Carlie
“A stupid idiot that shoulda followed his on law of backing up data”

The drive is powering on, then jumping into Kernel mode, which is why the motor powers down. This could be for any one of the following reasons:

PCB damage
Damaged head or heads
Media damage
Corrupt SA

I'd say that there really isn't much you can do yourself. I advise you stop powering on the drive, just to avoid any further damage, and send the drive to a data recovery professional. Don't bother going to your local computer shop, they won't have the tools needed to even properly diagnose this drive.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery