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Hard drive not detected after Linux involved

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bull - Jan 15, 2010 at 01:29 PM
 madnad - Feb 23, 2010 at 05:55 PM
Hello,

I recently played with Ubuntu installing and uninstalling with my spare hard drive.
After uninstalling Ubuntu from the spare hard drive, I took it out of the pc and put back in my original SATA hard drive which win xp installed and used to work fine but now I have problem. Computer won't detect or recognize the original SATA hard drive. I did not connect original hard drive and spare(linux) drive same time.

What I did was switching original hard with spare hard drive and installed/uninstalled ubuntu. And put this spare hard away and switch back to original hard drive. Meantime I switched bios AHCI to ATA back and forth couple of times when playing with spare hard.

So I am losing my good original one with lots of files in it.
What did I do wrong? How can I revive my original hard? Even I connect sata drive using external USB adapter to my laptop but it doesn't detect sata drive! I tried to boot up with win xp cd or vista cd but error message saying there is no hard drive found.
Help me!!!

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Answer 1 / 1
madnad
Feb 23, 2010 at 05:55 PM
the Linux install probably messed up the MBR (my first guess). In this case, your XP should not boot up either.
Second, see if your hard drive is seen in the bios.
Third, if you need your files from the hard drive - boot up with Linux cd (without installing Linux on to your hard drive) and try to retrieve those files
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