unable to boot up, hard drive not visible

Hi All,

without any previous symptoms my vista desktop suddenly wouldn't boot up from the hard drive.

I have put the Vista dvd in but the drive is no longer being 'seen', I can feel the drive whirring, but it isnt being detected at all.

I have two drives, the OS one was C: and a data one was D:

with them both plugged in, only the D: drive is visible, although it is now shown as C:

The only thing I had done very recently was some windows updates.

any help would be lovely, I hadn't backed up (I know, I know) and that drive has a lot of goodstuff on it....

Rob.

Hi Bonobo,
you might try starting up from a bootCD, such as Hiren's:
http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/
or ultimate bootCD: http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
dont't forget to make your Boot sequence starting with CDROM. once you are in the BootCD menu, you can start looking for your drive, maybe you can fix it with the HDD tools, maybe your MBR is damaged or killed by a virus, there are some virus scanners on the CD as well. at least on Hiren's boot CD there are, I don't think there is any on the "UBCD" , I understand that you need a working computer to be able to download the files, so I hope you have one of these CD's at hand or someone who can get you one.
good luck with your HDD

Well, I sure hope it helped. So Bonobo, in case you have had any use from our hints, please let us know and close the topic. :smile2: