I fried my hard drive last week. Dell has already installed a replacement
drive. My question is that the os will not recognize the old drive at all.
Like an idiot I forgot to backup my files. Is there a workaround? The disk
drive does not even show up in the recovery function.

"Bill" wrote in message
...
I fried my hard drive last week. Dell has already installed a replacement
drive. My question is that the os will not recognize the old drive at all.
Like an idiot I forgot to backup my files. Is there a workaround? The disk
drive does not even show up in the recovery function.

This is what I got from your statement and question:

You had a drive die and Dell replaced it with a working bootable hard drive.
You still have the dead drive and you want to get the information off of it
now that you have a working computer again. You can't get the bios or the
computer to "see" the bad drive. If you tried to put the bad drive in as a
second drive and have positioned the jumpers on the new and old drive
properly (for IDE drives) and attempted to run the drive without success you
are probably out of luck for a local recovery of the data.

The only workaround for a "fried" drive generally is a costly data recovery
service. By costly I believe most recovery companies charge between
$200-300 per 10 GB drive at a minimum and can go up steeply from there and
there still is no guarantee that the recovery service will obtain all the
data. There is no replacement for a good data backup program even for home
computer systems. As most say, it isn't "if" a hard drive will fail but
"when."

Does BIOS see the drive? Is it spinning up?, Depending on how it failed you
may be wasting your time.

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"Bill" wrote in message
...
I fried my hard drive last week. Dell has already installed a replacement
drive. My question is that the os will not recognize the old drive at all.
Like an idiot I forgot to backup my files. Is there a workaround? The disk
drive does not even show up in the recovery function.

Hi, Bill.

What is the make and model of your "dead" drive?

Most HD vendors provide utilities to test their drives. Seagate, for
examples, has SeaTools available on their website. Download it for free and
see if it can tell you anything about your hard drive. If a Seagate drive
fails the test within the warranty period (often 5 years), then Seagate will
issue an RMA (Return Materials Authorization) that you can use to return the
drive for warranty replacement. Of course, this might not apply in your
case since Dell has already replaced the drive. But the test might give you
clues to help you recover the drive contents.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2009 1202 in Win7 x64 6801)

"Bill" wrote in message
...
I fried my hard drive last week. Dell has already installed a replacement
drive. My question is that the os will not recognize the old drive at all.
Like an idiot I forgot to backup my files. Is there a workaround? The disk
drive does not even show up in the recovery function.

I've got one of those here too, not my own but a whole lot of data on it
that wasn't backed up... WD drive by any chance?
If some component on the harddrive's circuit board is fried there's a slim
chance you might recover the data yourself if you can get an exact
replacement board for it.

"Bill" wrote in message
...
I fried my hard drive last week. Dell has already installed a replacement
drive. My question is that the os will not recognize the old drive at all.
Like an idiot I forgot to backup my files. Is there a workaround? The disk
drive does not even show up in the recovery function.