Dell Inspiron 2650 not detecting HDD

[captaincurran]

let me paint the picture of what happened. I was at my college waiting for a friend, and i decided to look for the Harry Potter theme song in sheet music, the first site i went to gave me a majorly bad case of spyware, so i run adaware a few times, still doesn't clear it all up. and then i clear out the bad spywarey programs from my add/remove programs menu, after having to restart my laptop after uninstalling one of the programs, it wouldn't fully load windows, it'd stop at the wallpaper, so no icons, no start bar, no nothing but a cursor and my wallpaper. so i figured i'd do a format. After transfering some files to my tower. so i take out the hdd from the dell, hook it up to my Laptop HDD => IDE adapter and plug it into the Klingon kase which won't detect it, i tried putting the cable in different positions thinking, oh maybe i just have it in wrong. so i give up after trying every possible conceivable position and try to put it back into the laptop and format the sucker and reinstall xp. but now the dell won't detect it at all. can someone help me???

[cloasters]

Keplah captaincurran! Bump.

[JimF]

Most HDD manufacturers will let you download HDD test and diagnostic tools - that would be my first port of call.

I've also noted that some laptop hdds don't like sharing a disk controller cable so if your adaptor is on a cable thats already in use you made need to disconnect the other device.

[Aedan]

If nothing detects it, then it's possible the drive might be dead. Certainly some of the symptoms you were describing are consistant with a failing disk. First, make sure there's nothing that's obviously causing a short or similar on the drive.