Hitachi HDD not being recognised - except once!

[Byron172]

I hope someone might have an idea what is going on with this one as it's driving me MAD!!!!!

A buddy of mine has an external HDD that has a Hitachi Travelstar 250GB inside it. When he plugged it in it was not recognised in OS, BIOS or Disk Genius.

So I take the HDD out the enclosure and plug it into my PC using a mobile caddy (BTW it's IDE). Again - not recognised. So I have a look at the various jumper settings - there are A LOT compared to what I would usually expect to see (I will list them in a sec). So I chose the option

"16 HEADS - FORCING DEVICE 1 PRESENT".

Still no joy, until I go to Device Manager and scan for Plug & Play devices. At this point Windows recognises the drive and installs drivers and also allows me to browse the drive and even open the various files on it etc. so I think "you beauty - problem solved" and attempt to quick format the drive (as this is what my mate wanted done) and am subsequently informed by Windows (Vista) that the format could not be completed. Not only that but all of a sudden the HDD will not be recognised anymore so I am back to square one. What could the problem be - jumper settings? dead drive?

The various jumper settings are:

DEVICE 0 MASTER / DEVICE 1 SLAVE / CABLE SELECT / FORCING DEV 1 PRESENT

for:

16 HEADS / 15 HEADS / 32 GB CLIP / AUTO SPIN DISABLE.

[kryyst]

Is this a new drive? I mean it could just be that the drive is pooched.

[Byron172]

No the drive is a couple of years old apparently. You reckon it's just fcuk'd?

[kryyst]

Sounds very likely.

If it's on it's own ide ribbon it should be set to device master or cable select. If it's on an ide ribbon with another device the jumper setting is dependent on how that other device is setup.

Is the BIOS even detecting it?

[Byron172]

Is the BIOS even detecting it?

Nope - it thinks about it for a while then nothing.

[kryyst]

If you've tried all the jumper configurations and the bios still isn't seeing it correctly it's the drive.

[Byron172]

The weird thing is that it was discovered that one time and was completely navigable. Also - while I was able - I ran a quick diagnostic on it and the program I used reported back that it was in "good" health. I think I'll put in the too hard basket for now.

[kryyst]

Have you tried installing it directly in a machine not in a caddy or anything?

[Byron172]

Actually I haven't tried it on it's own without any other drives and directly on an IDE cable. Will do that today and report back....