Hi, I seem to be having an issue with an OLD HDD of MINE.. It's been working fine for years until now.. It's a WD 1TB Sata HDD..Running on a Desktop PC running Windows XP Professional

Basically I've always used it as a storage drive, never had windows installed on it, so just used for extra space on my desktop pc..

But now my computer wont recognize it, although if I press F8 on boot to load boot up choices.. it shows there are two HDD PLUGGED in, but once windows has booted there's only 1 HDD shown..

Is my HDD done for.. is there some way to fix this?

I know all the cables are working fine because it loads another HDD I have just fine, so don't really understand the problem.


Thank you in advance for reading.


Any Hard Drive can fail at any time. Older onus more often.
Hard Drive Tests
You can look over the posts given in the above page.
If the page above does not answer your questions, come back here.CrystalDiskInfo can be run on the drive to read the SMART data etc from it. http://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html ( The standard edition downloaded as a zip is what I use ). With both drives connected it should report info for both drives.

If you need to recover data from the drive  such as if file tables are broken, I use a tool called GetDataBack NTFS which works really well, although its free to try and buy to recover data. The free trial will show you file names that you can see are your own, but in order to get your data recovered you have to buy a registered copy. I am not aware of any good free ones. https://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

I bought this software a few years ago and fortunately only had to use it 3 times since buying it since drives rarely crash, but I was able to recover most of the data with exception to part of the drive that was damaged which was causing the drive to have the clunk of death. It took about a week for a spare Pentium II computer to recover about 8GB of a 12GB laptop HDD where the laptop drive was making the click, click, click, click noise, and somehow this software was able to read the platters and reassemble the data from the damaged drive to a healthy 20GB IDE HDD running Windows XP SP1 without any PATCHES offline.Hi, Chammiez

Can you see your drive in Disk Management and Device Manager? Are there any notification in Device Manager, showing that there is something going on with the drive? If you need a diagnostic tool, I advise you to use the WD Data Lifeguard Diagnostics. You can download it from the link below.
I would try to connect the drive to another PC or use a Linux Live CD to access the data and back it up.
Really, a hard drive may fail at any time as any other mechanical device. Keep a backup copy of your data just to be safe and prepared for every situation.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=810&sid=3&lang=en – Data Lifeguard Diagnostics

Hope this helps
*censored*, I apologize for not getting back to this POST.. I totally forgot I posted it here, I also brought a HDD dock, and still didn't work.. but this did allow me to notice the HDD is making a noise as if starting up. along with the ticking noise, I didn't notice this before..

But when put into the desktop, it doesn't show in device manager or Disk Management, but it can be seen on the 'Boot Order' on start up.. but it's no name like..

1. (random letters and numbers)
2.
3. CD Drive

Clicking on 2 does nothing it just says verifying blah blah system can not boot.

I've tried a few data recovery programmes and they don't find that hard drive..

If it's clicking, would me taking it apart a looking inside help atall... or will this just screw it up even further?
Installing a new hard drive is not hard.
But there are some things you need.
Some kind of backup that can restore your system.
Original install discs for the OS and applications.
Copies of important documents, photos and other material you created.
Hard rives under 1 TB are now very economical and are good values.
While SDD is desirable, the cost is often more that what many want to pay.
At the end of the day you want:
- A reliable System drive as the main storage drive.
- A backup drive and can be powered down when not needed.

It is seldom piratical doing  a 'restore' of an  old failing drive. I know how to, have done it, worked industry, and don't recommend it. Just buy new certified hard drives. Saves time and headaches.