Hard Drive Recovery Service?

[Matthew Gillen]

Kristian Erik Hermansen wrote:
> Maybe you guys will get a kick out of my stupidity here in various forms...

On the contrary, I admire your bravery!

> Now, what I want to know is if anyone here knows what the actual steps
> are that is happening during this phase of "Detecting IDE drives..."
> and if I can fool it somehow or force it to get past this snag.  Any
> ideas?  Just to let you know, I have tried this drive on four
> computers now, all with similar effects.  

Were they different OSes?  I once had a box with two harddrives, and one was
appearently flakey; while they were both plugged in, both Solaris (x86) and
Windows2000 would hang on boot (both in a similar "Detecting devices" stage).
 If I unplugged the flakey one, both those OSes would work.  Interestingly,
Linux neither hung on boot when the strange drive was plugged in, nor had any
problems using it once booted.

Of course, the most tolerant OS in my situation was linux, which I'm sure
you've already tried.  You might give a live-cd based BSD-derived distro a
shot since it's IDE drivers are likely to have different quirks.

Kind of clutching at straws, but it's free ;-)  (except for your time of course).

Matt

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