We have an HP Pavillion zd7005qv. The we got a "Operating System Not Found" error and tried to recover by going into the Recovery Console and doing FIXMBR. This didn't work. I actually replaced the drive and set up XP on it and it is working fine but I still would like to recover data from the old drive. When I boot up from the XP setup disk, I am able to go into the Recovery Console and look at the old drive. However when I boot from a bootable CD into DOS, the recovery programs that I have tried cannot see the drive. When I look into the BIOS, there is no drive. When I swap the new drive back in, the drive appears in the BIOS and the recovery programs can see it fine. Any idea what's going on?

Dos can't read the NTFS file system that you most likely used on that drive.

But that still doesn't explain why the bios doesn't see the disk and also the recovery programs running under DOS can see the new disk which is formated in NTFS.

When doing the switching of the drives are you sure you have the jumpers set correctly. If they are wrong, the BIOS won't see the drive.

It is a notebook and only has one drive and there are no jumpers used - set as master. The old drive worked fine before the "Operating System Not Found" error.

Sorry for not picking up on the laptop model. I hope you aren't buttoning up that entire laptop each time you are swapping things. I'm not sure how the recovery programs work but I don't think you are actually in DOS, rather at a command prompt. There are adapters available to connect the old 2.5" drive in a desktop machine or you could get an external USB enclosure to be able to connect via USB cable. If the drive can be seen by any means that means it is spinning up. The file system must be corrupted somehow. You may be able to recover the files from this drive by using a bootable Linux distro. Knoppix Linux fits on one CDR and will run off of it. There are utilties that allow reading of NTFS files. If you connect this drive to a desktop machine with some storage space you should be able to copy and paste the files to the desktop machine. The download is 699MBs so you definately need broadband. You may also buy a CD for a couple of bucks. Look here for the download mirrors. http://www.knoppix.net/get.php

I downloaded the Knoppix LINUX boot disk and put the drive into my 98SE desktop. I was able to boot with the CD and see the "faulty" HDD. I tried to copy a file from the notebook drive to the desktop drive and got an error. Fortunately I was able to figure out that the drives were write protected and fixed that. I moved most of the files to the desktop drive (almost filling it), rebooted in windows and burned them onto CDs and put them back onto the new notebook drive. I think that I have gotten the files that I wanted but I'll keep searching the disk for a while to make sure. I still don't know why the BIOS didn't see the drive but I guess that really doesn't matter. Thanks a lot for the help.