Hard Drive Crash!! Need Help!

[yankee427]

I left my computer on last night to do a defrag and some other system maintenance. I came back to the computer this morning and my monitor wasnt working and wouldnt come on. I hit the power button for the monitor and moved mouse cause I thought it was probably in stand by mode.

Nothing happened so I just held down the power button for five seconds as the last resort and shut it off. I turned on the computer and the first screen came up with memory testing.

Then it went to detecting IDE drives. The test just stopped and froze there for a while without doing anything. I restarted the computer to try again, still same thing.

Next time I tried and after about 10 minutes it went past this scan and got to the last check and just froze there and then the hard drive started to click and sounded like something was wrong with it and sounded like it was skipping and it could not boot into windows.

I put the drive into my other computer to try to boot it up as slave. It would detect the drive this time instantly, but it would get to the last part of the check before starting to load windows and just freeze there while the hard drive clicked.

Does this sound like a hard drive crash? What would have caused something like this to happen. Is there a program I can get that will be able to save everything from the hard drive even if it is unreadable because I have lots of saved things on there that can never be replaced.

Also, if I have to get a new hard drive, which brand should I get. The one I have now is WD, and I have had no problems with them up to this point.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot.

 

[toleraen]

Sounds to me like a hard drive crash...the clicking is never a good thing. I had the same thing happen on a brand new WD a few weeks ago.

When doing tech support for campus owned laptops...we usualy use Knoppix (http://www.knoppix.org/) a linux distro that boots off a cd, and mounts any available drives automaticaly. From there you can use smb to back up files to another computer. Pretty spiffy

 

[yankee427]

Thanks a lot for the help. Will try to use that program to fix it. Are there any other programs I could use if this one doesnt work right that anyone knows of?

 

[yankee427]

Double Post

 

[yankee427]

Anyone else know of any other good hard drive recovery programs that would help me fix this also?

 

[yankee427]

That program there does not help because the drive cannot be recognized anywhere. The drive will boot up and just not do anything and click a few times as it spins around which isnt a good sound. The drive cannot be recognized in DOS or any operating system.

Is there any way I will ever be able to get the data back or is the hard drive just dead and no way at all to recover any of it.

P.S. Sorry for double post.