Harddrive vanished overnight

[Chadsky]

First time poster, not sure where to go and a friend suggested this forum. Heres my situation!

I was using my computer and everything was going along just fine had it running for a couple days straight, nothing unusual. I get home from work and I know I'm going to a party at a friends so I shut down my PC. The next morning when I wake up and boot my computer I notice its taking an unusually long time to boot up and but to my surprise it only gets as far as checking all the ram and stuff and then tells me eventually that I need to select a drive to boot from.

I look around in the bios boot menu and it doesnt see my harddrive anywhere. We've checked all the connections and everything is good. Tried putting it in another computer and it cant see it either. Got to windows with it plugged in on another computer and it can't find it anywhere. It spins and acts like a normal harddrive when its connected but nothing sees it.

Is there anyway possible to get this harddrive to wake up from its coma? I just want to try and take some of the storage I had on there and back it up on my external. Is there anything I can do to get anything off this thing?

My PC is Vista 32bit and my friends that we hooked it up to and got to windows in is XP. Other than that, not sure what information might be useful. Thanks ahead of time!

 

[RebateMonger]

The drive has had a hardware failure of some sort. If the motor is running, and it appeared without any prior warning, then it's likely the PCB controller board on the drive.

Brand, model, capacity of the hard drive?

 

[Emulex]

i've got a boxen here (now retired) that takes about 25-60 (resets/power on/offs) to get the drive to go.

it's either dead

or close to dead.

so i'd give it a go at some creative power cycling (like power on/spin/power off/power back on quick) if the drive isn't able to reach rpm it may be easier to do this in an external enclosure or via separate power supply to avoid mucking up the mobo.

but indeed i have a drive that consistenly does this. fails to spin up fully 90% of the time. luckily i was persisent and got that 10% and copied my stuff off quick!

 

[mr3manuel]

if all you really need is to back up the data you have on the drive since it is obviously malfunctioning, i suggest you use a drive walker connected via usb and check if it shows up then or even just in the management console. if you can see your drive in the management console then any recovery programme like power data recovery will do the trick in getting what you need. the trial version will work