You better get a diagnostic from the hard drive manufacturer's web site. It really appears that the drive might be dead.

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side not to ham30 and Mechanix2Go - I read some place if one uses fdisk/mbr and it finds that the Signature bytes are bad, you will loose all partitions . I use a disk editor to changed the Signature bytes and lost all but first partition when fdisk/mbr was ran. I did have a back up of the MBR so had no problem. tImmaY - if fdisk says no fixed disk do as post #1 says. You may want to check in bios setup and see if it finds the hdd. " tried that from both the A and C drives, and it doesn't give me a place to type in the sys c" not sure what you are doing.

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http://www.claws-and-paws.com/virus/articles/fdisk.shtml "The signature bytes start off the MBR. They are set to the hexadecimal value 55 AA." The signature bytes are the LAST two bytes NOT the first two bytes. More errors on the internet everyday. Pick up MBRWORK to fix the mbr if need be.

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eh, i dont have the money to pick up books as of right now (i start a new job monday :-]) but if i just use the restore discs on the drive, everything would be fine.. correct? and then i have that GetDataBack program downloaded for FAT file partitions (and NTFS for mine) so if i used the restore discs, would it be possible to use that program to get back some of the information? i know some may be written over by using the restore discs, but not all of it (its like a 100gb drive, wasn't close to full). as of right now, i'm not sure as to what the key is for getting into the bios. i tried del & f2 and all those did was make the "hp whatever" screen sit there longer (the blue screen that the manufacturer puts on so you can't see the computer check the ram and what drives it detects, etc). " tried that from both the A and C drives, and it doesn't give me a place to type in the sys c" not sure what you are doing. when you put in a boot disk and tell it to start windows w/cd rom support, it goes into DOS and starts off with the A: drive. so then typing A:fdisk /mbr got me nothing. so then i couldn't see because that made it jump back to the top of the screen so i cleared the screen (cls) and got onto the C: drive. at this point, i tried the command again: C:fdisk /mbr, still got the No fixed partitions errror. so does anyone have an HP Pavilion 4530 and know what button you press to get into the bios? i'm going to have to open it up to see what kind of hard drive it has unless the bios can tell me.. so i'll wait to open it. thanks for all the help.. ::tim

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"but if i just use the restore discs on the drive, everything would be fine.. correct?" I don't see how - if you're receiving the 'no fixed disks present' message, the system is not recognizing your hard drive - no commands relating to C: will work (and entering 'C:fdisk /mbr' makes no sense at all) How do I get into CMOS? Click

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MBRWORK is freeware (software) Get MBRWORK here, about 3/4 the way down on page. http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/utilities.html

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To what purpose? 'no fixed disks present' has to be resolved before anything else. As well, regarding MBRWork: "It should only be used by power users who understand how computers work." Quite the admonition Click

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You got me confused. Until you get 'hold of' the HD, forget recovery. forget winders CD, forget 3rd party file savers. Get booted on a floppy and stay there. M2

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ok, so F1, F2, F10, and Del all will not get me into the bios. anymore ideas? i also got the error message from the SMART feature that the drive is going to die.

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Who is the BIOS manufacturer? That info should be onscreen at the start - that's what determines the key sequence. If you were receiving the 'no fixed disks' message, that means that the drive is not being seen by the BIOS - usually due to a physical problem with the disk. No commands involving the drive would work - with the possible exception of certain HDD diagnostics which may be able to query an unrecognized drive. Certainly none of the fdisk options will work, and it would be pointless to attempt to use the restoration disks or pretty much any other software until the drive is seen by the BIOS. Since it seems to have magically come back, it's likely an intermittant problem - however, the SMART warning pretty much confirms that the drive is unreliable. You may try diagnostics or check the cables etc, but it doesn't appear promising. 98% of all statistics are made up

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The problem is, I have no clue what the BIOS manufacturer is because during the initial boot sequence, all I get is a blue "hp" screen *thanks hp, but that doesn't help any*. So if you can tell me how to get rid of the screen, I can tell you the BIOS manufacturer :) And I'm going to try a disk diagnostic utility, i just have yet to get my computer to best buy to get a new floppy so i have to use my parents'.

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Ok - well, you could try running through the list, or maybe try holding down a key at startup to try and force a keyboard error which might let you in. If you're receiving the SMART error now, then the drive is being recognized - at least presently - but it may prove expedient to backup any needed data. Might even try the drive as a slave in another machine if you have very much. Give the diagnostic a whirl, but the SMART warning is likely correct. 98% of all statistics are made up

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Hey, i tried the diagnostic and it didn't detect a hard drive. i took out the hard drive to send it in with an RMA but i got curious so i stuck it in my computer and VOOSH! its there, i can access / view its files, everything seems to be in order. what on earth is going on?? i know its not the cable because i tried multiple cables and evidently its not the hard drive thats faulty..

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See if you can run the diagnostic on it in that machine. Seems like an intermittant problem.. it comes and goes. Barring that, maybe a controller problem in the original machine, but it's difficult to be certain. 98% of all statistics are made up

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yea.. this is pretty crazy because i have it up and running right now in the original machine and all i did was put it in mine, run mine, run that hard drive in mine, and stick it back in there. this thing is crazy.. personally i think the guy should just get another computer because he's already payed me $40 for fixing it the first time and this time will prly be another $40.. pretty soon, he's going to have spent as much on me as he would have on a new one. lol, but i'm downloading another diagnostic that you can run in windows and i'm going to have that test the drive.. wait! i still have the diagnostic on the floppy.. i can run that right now...... what was it supposed? cuz like, it checked the drive and didn't report any errors and i could look at the technical information on the drive and i could update the MBR and do all sorts of stuff (none of which i could do the first time i ran it) but it didn't tell me anything.

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All I can say is that intermittant errors are the hardest to diagnose. Either the problem lies with the drive itself, or with some component on the original machine. 'No fixed disks present' is pretty much a show stopper, and the SMART warning's a bad sign as well. It is cause for concern, but if all is running again... enjoy it while it lasts. Perhaps it's all been a fluke, but more likely something is wrong somewhere. 98% of all statistics are made up

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do you think it could be the ram? because if the CPU was bad then it wouldn't run. if the mobo was bad, it wouldn't run. those are all the components it NEEDS to operate, so then the only thing left is the ram.. b/c if the ram is bad then it could do a whole slew of things and its the old skewl ram too, lol.

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Yeah - that's a possibility, and well worth checking. All sorts of odd behaviour can be attributed to bad RAM. Could swap it out or give memtest86 a shot. Sometimes it just needs to be reseated due to poor contact. 98% of all statistics are made up

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