[SORTA SOLVED:] Re: recover from a bad F16 install

[Paul Allen Newell]

On 3/19/2012 6:54 AM, William Hooper wrote:
>
> I don't believe anyone has suggested it, but are your sure your hard
> drive is still functioning?  The file you attached doesn't detect any
> hard disks, just two optical drives:
>

Well, this seems to be it. I found my xw8000 diagnostic cd and it says 
the machine has two optical drives.

The rescue disk won't let me do a sfdisk to archive what's there and, 
looking in /dev, I don't see any sda/sdb/hda/hdb entries.

Testdisk says there is nothing to test. GParted says there are no devs.

Since I have two harddrives, the odds that both of them went out at the 
exact same time is unusual. Looking on the web, I am seeing indicates 
that a lack of detection of hard drives could be a motherboard issue.

Opened the box up, cleaned and reseated cables ... still no hard drives.

I am inclined to think that I have a hardware failure regarding the 
computer seeing any hard drives and therefore it is a dead computer 
whose demise was not caused by an installation of F16.

Unless someone has a suggestion, I think I'll salvage for parts and let 
it go at that. Its a 10+ year old 32bit machine that I got for @$300 and 
I just can't see the value in throwing cash at it.

Thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions ... I know more about 
partitioning / formatting after this exercise.

Paul