Hard Drive Not being Recognised

Hi All,

I have a laptop (AST Ascentia 910N) I bought it way back in 1998. It was working fine all these years. Suddenly one fine morning I find that it doesn't boots up stating the message that no fixed drive present. Probably it doesn't recognize the hard disk. I need a solution to recover the data from it and also is there any possibility to put it back to work. The most important thing is the data. Since i do not have a backup of my recent work which was there in it and it is very important. Your help will be highly appreciated.

For your information I have tried all sorts of tricks till now but all in vain. I need a really professional and expert advice on this.

Bye for Now
cheers
susheel

The first thing to do is go into the Bios and see if the drive can be detected (F2)
If it detects the drive then loses the drive settings after it has been turned off the battery is no good, look at the page at the following link.

http://www.ari-service.com/bulletin/ib/0081ib.htm

AST RESEARCH, INC. INFORMATIONAL BULLETIN # 0081 1/27/99

Optimum Longevity from Your Notebook Battery
Care and feeding of your battery is an important part of notebook ownership and will reward you with maximum battery life.

If you are or know a competent computer user try this.

If after charging or replacing the battery you still have no joy you could take out the drive and with a IDE converter/connector install into a another computer to see if it can be detected, I WOULD USE AN OLD COMPUTER.FOR THIS.

If your data is very important you can send it to a company who specialise in data recovery (not cheap)

http://www.ari-service.com/default.asp


Due to a faulty batch I lost a 40gig Maxtor drive recently, I learnt a long time ago about the importance of external backups.