Please Help: "Hard Drive Not Installed"

[shinjiplus]

hi everyone,

i'd appreciate your opinion on this problem that i am having.

i have an X20, running XP/Fedora Core 4 dual-boot using GRUB. I have an NTFS partition for XP, a FAT32 partition for sharing data, and FC4 takes up the rest.

a couple days ago, i had a "scheduled" windows xp scan of the FAT32 partition, which did find a small amount of data in bad clusters. i forgot to turn off my machine and it was running windows' screensaver all day long. i was using it for a couple hours, shut it down, and went back to turn it on after a couple hours and i got the above message: "Hard Drive Not Installed".

i had received this message once before as i hadn't screwed the drive in and it fell out, but that was a few months ago and everything has been fine since then.

there is no hdd access (the light doesn't go on) but the hdd is spinning.

i tried reseating to no avail. after numerous boots with no success, i left it off... only to try again the next morning where i could boot into windows.

after that however, i have been unsuccessful in booting.

could this problem be my MBR? GRUB? or is the drive dead?

thanks in advance!

[christopher_wolf]

Interesting, that sounds like a hardware problem with the HDD and/or the IDE connector. Can you boot into Fedora? If you have another HDD laying around that you know works, you could try that in the Thinkpad and see if it is the HDD or not. If you are able to boot up again, use the SMART Utilities to check the HDD. HTH

[shinjiplus]

looks like my HDD is dead. even the freezer didn't help

well... time for a new harddrive! any quiet, reasonably priced drives out there? time for a search of the forums...