Hello. I'm new here. I have a Gateway Laptop with a WD5000BPVT 500GB hard drive, dated 11 SEP 2011. I need to recover data, but I'm reluctant to spend large amounts of money and am also not comfortable having an outside service look at "my life" on it (home escrow, bank, family, data etc.) I bought a replacement hard drive, so the computer is working again. The bad drive is giving me the message "PXE-E61 Media test failure, check cable". I tried to run it on a USB cable (cable tested and works), and it still doesn't see the drive. The drive spins (no noises, no clicks, just a normal spinning sound). I did not do anything to cause this. It worked fine, I dozed off, woke up, and came back to this nightmare. For what it's worth, the bios DOES sees that it's a WD5000BPVT 500GB hard drive inserted.
Help please?

Much appreciated!

Kevin

PXE-E61 Media test failure = seems the laptop is trying to boot from network as the drive is not recognised.

So said :

1) How do you know you'll spend "large amounts of $$$ " in data recovery as still you didn't had the drive diagnosed ?
2) Serious DR company don't have the time to look at your stuff . Of course if you send the drive to suspicious locations where they grant your data will be back with $100 or less, maybe....

There's little to "help" without other elements unless you want remote internet clairvoyance , and the drive should be analyzed PROPERLY

You should get your drive diagnosed, with that, DR company will provide their quote and you can decide if that is too expensive for you.
If BIOS does see that drive, it might not be expensive at all.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

Thanks you two. I'll consider your suggestions, but for now I'm going to hold out for suggestions I can try from home. I'd gladly send $100 (paypal, money order, or credit card) to anyone that types a suggestion that successfully enables me to recover my data, even if that advice is only one sentence long and takes 5 secs to type. I just want my data.
Thanks!

A good start would be to run a test from Mhdd or Victoria for Windows.

First set laptop bios to ata/compatibility mode instead of ahci. You need to boot the laptop from the Mhdd cd and report back the drive details as shown;
1- model number
2- serial number
3- firmware revision

Then you have to check smart to see if there are any pending and or reallocated sectors. Then post the results in this thread.

Thank you Dick. I will let you know.

Dick, I've been using computers for about 10 years. But I still have lots to learn (sorry) I went into the BIOS and I think (?) my only options are AHCI Mode and IDE Mode (under SATA mode settings) I did not see an ATA option. Am I suppose to start first with the Mhdd test first and foremost? Or is that step 2? Thanks!

Use IDE, it's ATA mode.

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

Will do. Thank you =)