Hard Drive Error - Trying to diagnose

[brianblair]

The hard drive in my brother's computer started acting funny...he was getting sporadic reboots and then system files were missing upon reboot. Finally he kept getting a BSOD and could never recover from it. I replaced the drive and got his computer running again.

I put the troubelsome hard drive into a USB enclosure thinking I could run chkdsk on it and possibly pull his data off of it. When I plug the drive in to a computer running Windows XP and turn the drive on, it whirrs for about 10 seconds, and the computer then reboots itself.

I'm looking for a way to diagnose this drive but when I can't even access it when it is plugged in, how the heck can I do this?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this is something I have never encountered before.

EDIT:::::
The drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 500 GB Model HDS725050KLA360 Mfg'd in June 2005
It does not have any jumpers so I can't set it to slave.

 

[Mondoman]

Sounds like there may be a hardware failure in the drive's controller board, perhaps leading to unusual voltages on one or more of its interface pins. I certainly wouldn't plug it into any equipment that I didn't want to have fried. If you really want to recover data, you'll probably have to send it to a specialist company. If it really is just a controller board issue (rather than physical drive issue), they may be able to recover all the data fairly straightforwardly by attaching a new controller card.

 

[brianblair]

**UPDATE**

I took the drive to my local computer shop. They were able to retrieve the data using some sort of data recovery software to make a bit by bit copy of the drive. The bad drive has been junked.