Q: I have a hard drive that was somehow completely erased when my little cousin pressed a certain button on the keyboard. when i tried to access the drive i get an "invalid system disk or disk error" message. I tried to open the hard drive by making it a secondary drive on another operating system but when i go to the My Computer menu the secondary (d:\ ) drive doesn't even exist! When i tried to install windows xp on the drive it said, " THIS DISK IS NOT ACCESSIBLE" and some other stuff but i forgot it. I went into the bios and it showed up as a western digital hard drive. I checked it with Active Smart and it said that it was ok. I was wondering if the HDD was corrupted or dead by the pressing of a certain button or is this a problem with windows? the computer i have is a: COMPAQ Presario SR1703WM if anybody needed the information. also: What is a SATA drive? that also shows up in the bios.
A: It seems as if the disk may have become corrupted. Also keep in mind that Windows operating systems only recognize a drive if it is formatted right. I believe that Windows can recognize file systems formatted as NTFS and FAT32. I would try to reformat the drive to NTFS. There is no button that would corrupt a hard drive. If pressing this button DID cause the problem, then there is a problem with your motherboard or something more serious is happening. If you are acquainted with it, try booting into a Ubuntu Live disk. (This is an operating system that runs off of a CD alone) I use this as a tool to diagnose computers that have bad operating systems, as the Ubuntu doesn't need an operating system to run. While in Ubuntu I would run this in the command prompt to get to the partitioning program: sudo gparted& be very careful with the program Gparted... it is powerful but easily reformats drives. To download a free copy of Ubuntu, visit their site: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download