Restoring a glitched up HDD

[Ronyx]

I have recently tried to do something very foolish... I put an external HDD running over USB 1.1 internally and hooked it up via an IDE cable.

Passing some problems with my computer detecting it, I got up to it being visible, yet non accessible. The partition was all messed up so I thought I would try to repartition it. Bad went to worst and now it won't work internally or externally.

Can someone please help me getting it working internally? Anything I can do to wipe it clean and start fresh?

[Drum Thumper]

I'd start by checking to make sure all your cables are fully inserted.

[Redundant]

I'm somewhat confused by how you worded your post. I'm assuming the HDD originally used USB in it's case and now you took it out of the case and plugged it into an IDE cable.

Is it a 2.5" HDD (laptop drive) or a standard 3.5" HDD? 2.5" drives need an adaptor to be used in a desktop.
Also, did you remember to plug in the molex power plug? If only the IDE cable is in, then you can see the drive but not access it, as you described above.

[SgtM]

I'll agree with Redundant. Worst case, if you REALLY need to wipe the drive, use a little program called DBAN (Darik's Boot and Nuke) (http://dban.sourceforge.net/). You can use it to format, write 0's, and even DoD (Dept of Defense) wipe the drive if you want. Just download, burn the image to CD, and reboot your computer with the CD in a drive.

**WARNING** DBAN will TOTALLY erase ANY data on ANY disk that it finds. If you use this utility, avoid mistakes and ONLY plug in the drive that you need to wipe.

[crenn]

Does your BIOS find the HDD when plugged internally?

And since you're within range, where exactly are you based? (PM this if you want to give that information) I may be able to come to you to help with this.

[Bucko]

My first though was did you mark the partition active?

Go Control Panel ->Administravtive Tools ->Computer Management->Disk Managment then right click on the drive and mark the partition as active.

http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/5026/partitionot7.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

Here's where you will find it by right clicking on the drive. As you can see it is greyed out on mine because it is already marked as active.
You can also format the drive here by clicking on the format part of the menu after right clicking on the drive you want to format/activate.

[Ronyx]

Thank you for all the replies. I will try to do everything suggested to me in this topic and get back to you guys tomorrow.

I will double and triple check that i have everything plugged in and correctly hooked up.

It is a 3.5" HDD. I don't think I activated the partition so I will try this tomorrow. Otherwise seems like DBAN will be my only option.

P.S. If I want to install Xubuntu on one of the disks in my system, will I need to wipe it with DBAN first or can Xubuntu do that for me? It has Windows XP Pro installed on it.

[crenn]

The Xubuntu should be able to do that for you.