Disk spinning. No blue lights. On/off button not working. No acces to disk over LAN or othewise. Disk showes 4 partitions when mounted in HDD adapter, but disk does not show in "my computer".

From what i understood is. you've cleaned HDD, and Recreated partitions. or if not recreated partition and then too it showed as partition as before then Hard Drive having issue and showing ghost partitions and which can not be accessed.

1) test the cables in another devices and see if work, if work your problem is the blue rays.
2) test the output terminal from dirty, corrosion, oxide and clean it with c. cleaner.
3) otherwise the blue ray need to clean the OPU, pass the disk cleaner specially from R. shack. and fix it.
4) othewise the blue ray is faulty, go to the repair shop TV for fix it.
God bless you

Click the "Start" button, type "diskmgmt.msc" and look at the Disk list from 0~x and find "G Drive (E: )". Check the disk on the right side with a blue long bar on top which is partitioned disk. It will be one blue partition indicating that the HDD capacity is near 732GB. If the G Drive has more than one partition on it, then u need to delete all and merge it to one partition. Go to partition and just click right button of your mouse, choose "Volume Delete(D)" and proceed to delete. If all partitions are deleted then right click to make a new volume "New Simple Volume" and follow the wizard's steps to create and format(NTFS) your new volume. This will solve your problem and if not, it might have a HW error or any problem with the disk itself. You'll need to check it at the Apple store where you bought it.

BTY, PC NTFS formated HDD might need a utility for the MAC os to read the HDD properly. You can use NTFS-3G or Paragon NTFS, but "Mounty for NTFS" will be the easiest one for you.

for blue screen : just change slot of ram or change ram.. for sata driver : just insert partitionmagic disk and partition your hdd.. otherwise clean your hard disk using any hdd utility or Hiren's Boot CD

Install a partition manager program like
http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm
open it and you will see the entire hard disk. In there either create another partition in the unallocated space or add it to the D partition.

1) have checked bios cannot see hdd mounted.

That is BAD -- the disk-drive could have "died".



2) tried a seagate hdd works fine so connections in laptop seem to be working

That shows that your motherboard is GOOD, but that your disk-drive is BAD.



3) can hear hardrive trying to do something as can hear harddrive usual noise, continous noise for about 5 sec before getting the error message

That is BAD -- the disk-drive is "dying".



4) no rattling or crackling noise from drive apart from the above

That is BAD -- none of the files can be read from your disk.




i have created a ubuntu boot up disk which allows me to access laptop but does shows error when locating hdd,

That is BAD.




once in ubuntu i can access internet but it does not show the windows partition of the harddrive, only shows ubuntu as opearing system, confused.

That is BAD. Only the CD/DVD disk has been mounted -- Ubuntu could not mount the disk-drive.




In regards to ubuntu working does this mean the hdd is ok?

No, it means that your motherboard is working.






and is there anyhting i can try via ubuntu to locate the files?

No. The disk-drive is "dead".




There exist commercial "data recovery" services that can try to repair your device, just long-enough to rescue and copy your files. For example, see: https://services.seagate.com/index.aspx?lng=en-US for a "no data - no charge" guarantee.

You must using solaris format utility to label thies T4-2600 drive. And you must put 512byte/sector MO disk into drive. for example:
1.$ su - root ;Become root user
2. # format ; identified disk
3. choose disk
4. label disk
5. if type unknow please input : type
6. choose T4-2600
7. label
8. modify disk partition
9. newfs ; ex: newfs /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0
10. mount disk
11. using MO disk like HDD

Probably BIOS limitations on the hard disk, perhaps an update would help.

As far as Im aware VS08 only works on Vista/XP

Did you format the drive using Disk Utility? Open "disk utility" from the dock icon or applications/utilities folder. Click the drive name on the left side of the disk utility window. click the "partition" tab in the window, next click the "options" tab and select GUID Partition scheme, or any Mac compatible scheme, read each explanation of the schemes. Name and resize your partitions, click apply. This is how it works running Leopard, not positive if the same applies to Tiger. I hope this helps you

Some of the following answer assumes a windows operating or possibly DOS based operating system. If your original OS was not Windows or DOS -- there may be different considerations.

1) Did you lose the contents of both partitions?
That depends were they soft or hard partitions.
Soft partitions are created as files inside of other partitions
If that is what you had allocated in the formatted partition
you have lost their data content.
Hard or physical partitions allocated using FDISK and some other utilities the second partition would still exist.

2) Where are/were your system files. Often but not always they appear as the first partition of the master drive on the primary IDE controller all assuming a PC (based on the master slave comments you have indicated.) (sometimes the second when diagnostics are loaded on the first partition)

a) if the partition on the drive you formated contained the system files yes they must be installed to access anything on the disk for the most part. A significant exception may be utilization of a DOS boot diskette might permit DOS access to the other partitions if they are formatted with the FAT file system.

NTFS partitions and possibly FAT32 partitions may not be accessible to all versions of DOS -- there may be some bootable CD's that would allow access to NTFS partitions without installing an operating system.

Question back from the DOS and older version of windows days and even some more modern operating systens in subsequent actions with the disk did you use FDISK or another utility to rewrite the boot blocks to point to a different partition?

Question this was not a dual boot machine was it?-- if so disregard anything that follows.

Question did the machine boot after formatting the partition and before you started moving the drives around? If so the operating system is probably on a drive you have removed from the machine. It needs to be replaced onto the same cable position it was originally located upon -- probably on the Primary IDE cable master position or jumper setting.

If not reinstallation of the operating to the formatted partition is probably the correct next step. Be careful in doing this because if you choose one of the other partitions that were not formatted it could wipe out the data in them based on the installation process chosen.