Is there any way of saving a completely unrecognisable hard drive?

God bless afternoon naps. Thanks, I downloaded the Seagate active partition recovery and have found that it's certainly not empty and can't throw it out just yet. Just have to wait another 12 hours superscan to finish.

Thanks again for your help :)

I'm having trouble using the win32 disk imager, I managed to find a copy of the program that would actually work, and mounted the SeaToolsDOS223ALL.ISO to the USB but it didn't work on startup, (no bootmgr.exe). Can't use Rufus, as it says it's not a bootable iso file, so maybe I have the wrong file but I'm not sure where the right file is.

Are you following the exact procedure of creating a bootable pen drive as given in option 2 of Arc's tutorial?
i.e., extracting the ISO with 7-Zip or WinRAR, renaming the seatools.ima as seatools.img and then write that to Win32 Disk Imager?

Also in BIOS AHCI to ATA (IDE/SATA)

You can download Win32 Disk Imager from Win32 Disk Imager | SourceForge.net

( Rufus will not work with that ISO)

If still you have problems just forget about it. Write the ISO into a CD and boot from that CD to run Seatools.

Ah I wasn't doing the extracting part, guess I skipped over it thinking I had already done it. Anyway, I got it to work, though no devices were detected, my BIOS thing was already in IDE (is that good/bad?), so is it safe to say that there is nothing I can do to see what's on this hard drive?

Seagate External drive: You can still open the external case, take out the HDD, hook it as a second internal drive on a desktop and check.

Western Digital external drive: Try with Lucid Puppy. As I said if you had done it properly you should atleast see your internal drive as well as the Lucid Puppy pen drive . If you didn't see anything I can only say you again did not do it properly.

Note: I followed my own instructions in post#8 :),created my Lucid Puppy pendrive just to make sure that I haven't faltered anywhere. When I booted my desktop with it I could see all the drives connected - my internal drive, the Lucid Puppy pendrive, and another external HDD. Screenshot below.



BIOS: If your system was setup as IDE, leave it at that. No need to change it.

I have no more suggestions to offer.

Thanks very much for your suggestions, I got at least one to work, I appreciate your help :)