Please help me to determine if my hard drive is dead

[Nucleus]

Hello, I have been on the phone with dell tech support the last few days. All I have to say is I went from thinking they had pretty good tech support to regretting very much I bought a dell (it turns out they have nonstandard hardware and the windows cd they gave me wasn't a custom one it apparently needed). So I had been troubleshooting with them several times on how to get my windows to install and one of the things they had me do was take out my second hard drive (which has all of my data on it now that I was trying to format the first one). They wanted to do this because it didn't come with the computer and they couldn't handle supporting me with anything in there that wasn't put in by dell.

The first hard drive is a SATA and the second one they had me pull out of the tower is an IDE (which shares a ribbon cable with my dvd drive). After I took it out and wanted to put it back in, it doesn't seem to work. When I put it back in the BIOS can't seem to recognise it and the dvd drive doesn't work either. When I take it out again the dvd drive works fine. I've set the jumper to both master and cable select and its the same problem.

I am in disbelief at the moment that dell had me do this after telling me to put all of my data on there, and I want to know if the hard drive is dead? Everyone at dell seems to say something different but none of them want much to do with the drive because it wasn't put in by dell (even though they told me to put all of my data on it). One of the people said my hard drive might have been electrocuted to death or something like that while taking it out...

What do you guys think? Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Thank you very much for your time.

 

[Impotence]

Welcome to hardwareforums Nucleus! :beer:

Does it work without the DVD drive? and what is the DVD drive set too? (Master / Slave / CS)

 

[henry222]

Hard drives are fairly robust, unless you zap them with static, or apply shocks, knocks etc.
Whatever you do don't do anything that might corrupt what data is there!
Maybe you will have to take the drive to a Recovery Co who will charge you Lots to extract the data - but if it's valuable then that surely not an issue.
It seems odd that the version of Windows was supplied "wrong" - Don't they say "Only to be used with a Dell PC" - I'm sure I've seen this....and the variation in spec from a real PC is very little, but just enough to provide the Dell helpline with an income. ((It also stops modders fiddling with a business PC))
Your experiences tells us all that anything other than a standard clone is bad news when anything goes wrong - only When -not "if" . . . .
- What surprises me is that you bought an expensive PC and then made some non-standard changes - surely the best solution to this is to buy all the kit you want "inside" the Dell, then add bits like HDD's by USB? This can't invalidate the G'tee and the possibility exists to move the HDD physically so as to guard against theft, fire etc.
( oh and PC failure), although I must admit this is scant comfort to you now. Presumably you did it for the best of reasons.
I suspect Dell Staff are not permitted to veer off a prescribed "script" and then when they do that is why you get variation on a theme - they are "probably not " sufficiently clued up to resolve the problem.

Impotence (here) is right to ask - have you fired up the BIOS to see what drives it thinks are master/slave, it should id the DVD and tell you what it is....if you can't resolve the jumpers. However, I'm surprised you've got to the jumper-stage - did this (non-Dell) set-up never work?
Who fitted the extra HDD? - did you pay for a faulty installation?...I suspect it worked at first....but what caused the failure to manifest itself. . . or was it an old drive which then failed in service? Why else would you fit an IDE-drive to a new SATA-style PC?
You need to supply some better details IMHO.

 

[Nucleus]

Thank you both very much for the replies. I'm sorry for my original lack of detail, but I actually figured out what the problem was. It turned out it was the ribbon cable, because when we tried a different one it worked. The ribbon cable and everything worked fine for a while, it was only until dell told me to take it out that their was a problem. As for the XP, they shipped me a disk which apparently works with most dell's but not mine, and this is a common issue for my specific PC. Something about a controller or something needing a different driver which the standard XP does not have. Anyway, thanks again for the help!