I know little of the subject matter except for every websource I've found is just a capitalist site trying to get me to send them my hard drive for an exquisite fee. The drive is completely unreadable by BIOS when trying to load Windows (yes, and I'm proud I follow my corporate masters). I have found software for data recovery but not for a completely unreadable drive. The only thing I can think to do, under warranty I am getting a new free hard drive so I set that to my master and load Windows on it, install the software and try to recover as much as possible from the ohter drive (now slave). If anyone would be willing to enlighten me on the subject it would be greatly appreciated.

Oh and... Hi vL :P

Tell us more about how "unreadable" it is. Does it show up in BIOS? What does it say when you try to boot from it?

it doesn't show up in BIOS and the error message is something along the lines of "Failed to detect hard drive" It is not my computer with the problem, I got all the information over the phone, I was just looking for general method solutions more than a specific answer to my problem.

The general solution is to plug in the hard drive ;)

When you get that kind of error, it's very often a loose connector. Verify that the hard drive is properly plugged in. If that doesn't work, you might want to try it in another computer to be sure your powersupply and motherboard are ok. If it doesn't work in another computer, you will probably have to swap the pcb on it. Thing described that operation in some other thread.

If you isolate the problem to the hard drive, it is possible that the controller board could be bad. That was the problem in my case.

https://davnit.net/bnet/vL/phpbbs/index.php?board=2;action=display;threadid=5587;start=msg47418#msg47418

Well, I did not put the kid to ease with my frank honesty and therefore redirected him to cipher who now has the computer, so if he wants to post a follow-up of what was wrong you can find out what was wrong with it if you care to know.