BOOT DISK FAILURE after power surge

[cupajava]

The computer was running as I got hit with a power surge. I have it hooked up to cheap surge protector but now I'm getting BOOT DISK FAILURE on bootup. All other parts seem fine and it does post so Im not sure if it was just the sudden loss of power that caused it. It's a sata2 250 gb samsung sp2504C. It now can't be read by the bios but I do hear it spinning. I've even tried to hook it up to another computer with the same result. It even caused my other computer to shut down so I immediately removed it. Is trying to recover any data from it a lost cause? Oh yeah, I never backed it up anywhere either.

It's less than a year old and I am going to get it replaced but I wanted to see if I could salvage the data or even fix the hard drive. Any ideas?

 

[Seekermeister]

Tough question. If it were an IDE drive, I would say to buy the new/OS and install this one as a slave, hoping to be able to access it from the new drive. But, since SATAs have no jumpers, there would be no slave. You could run the new & old drives in a non-raid configuration, and it might work...I've never tried it.

EDIT: Be sure to set the new drive as boot in the bios.

 

[Seekermeister]

Before doing any of this, buy an UPS.

 

[Lemon law]

Boot to dos---or a knoppix cd---and run diagnostics from there---could well be a dead hard drive---and could be a pile of other things.

But step one--if you suspect the hard disk--remove it from the equation---trouble shooting 101.

 

[EricMartello]

I have the exact same drive, two of them actually, same situation. There was a black out while I was asleep. I woke up and turned on my comp only to find out one of the HDDs wasn't being detected by the bios. What I noticed was that the drive spins up, makes some clicking noises then spins down even with the power still connected. THe other drive is fine and since it is my boot drive, my PC still works. Unfortunately the other drive was my data drive. I was very lucky to be able to get it working long enough to back up the data.