Data Recovery: Data Loss and Drive Failures

General Error Reading Drive C

“Who is General Error and why is he reading my disk?” Okay, so it’s a corny tech joke. What this error means is not that General Error is reading your drive, but that there is an error in locating your bootable hard drive; the one where the operating system resides. The following tips are applicable to any hard drive, boot or otherwise, if it is not detected.

First, check to see if the drive shows up in the BIOS. If it does, but you can’t see it from the operating system, make sure it is a partitioned and formatted drive (if you have just installed it), and check the IDE drive configuration.

If the drive has been recently removed, or another IDE drive has been added onto the IDE cable, make sure the jumper settings are correct. That is often a cause of undetected drives. The easiest way to take care of this is to set both drives to “CS” (Cable Select) if they are on an 80-line IDE cable. A Master and CS, as well as a Master and Slave configuration may be used in addition to choosing to use the CS configuration. If the drives are on a 40-line cable, the bootable hard drive must be set as “Master”, and the secondary device can either be set to “Slave”. Note that with Western Digital drives, a single master drive uses no jumpers, while a master with slave configuration uses a jumper. The “Master” drive should go on the middle connector, while the “Slave” drive should go on the end. If that doesn’t work, try putting the drive alone on the end of an IDE cable.

Once in a while, the two drives on the same IDE cable have conflicts or have been misconfigured, rendering one or both drives undetectable. If you still aren’t getting any successful results, check for bent or broken pins on the interface connector and try another IDE cable. They go bad occasionally.

As for SATA drives, there isn’t any configuration to go through. Just make sure the connections are secure, and if the drive still isn’t being read, try another SATA cable.

Each drive manufacturer releases drive diagnostic software designed to work specifically with their drives in order to help you determine the problem. If you are unable to solve the problem with the errors/suggestions that the diagnostic software returns, it will help give the manufacturer’s support staff an idea of what is going on. So, make sure you jot down what it comes up with and include the information when you call/email the manufacturer’s tech support line.

Manufacturer’s diagnostic software:

• Fujitsu’s Diagnostic Tool
• Hitachi’s Drive Fitness Test
• Seagate’s SeaTools
• Western Digital’s DLG Diagnostic
• Maxtor’s PowerMax

If the drive checks out okay, then there may be a problem with the operating system (if it is the case that the bootable drive is not being detected) and any number of software problems may be occurring whether it is conflicts or viruses. If there is a problem detected by the diagnostic utility, you could have a corrupted boot sector and/or MBR on your hands, caused by the normal wear and tear on the drive, write errors, or viruses. In any of these cases, you can try these fixes. Note that if you are running a multiboot setup, your boot menu will be destroyed.