Doesn't sound good. I'll ask a couple of possibly dumb questions. Was the motherboard powered up and the drive running when you moved it? When you disconnected and connected the drive / cables? Well, I had to ask just because of the way you worded it. Almost anything can happen, and I don't know just what your experience level is. Normal changing of a drive from one position to another with power off shouldn't cause it to fail.
If it isn't spinning up, or even if it is spiining up but no BIOS (on this system or any other) can detect it, then there's really just one way to get the data. You'll have to have a data recovery service handle it. That is VERY expensive. I haven't used one in years, since I helped a friend find one. I guess the price could have gone up or down since then. The price for recovering his data (off a 500 megabyte drive!) was a little over a thousand dollars! The procedure involves disassembling the drive in a clean room and reading the surface with very specialized equipment. Assuming you've tried different connection possibilities and made sure the problem wasn't a cable or jumper or some such I'm thinking this is about the only way to go.
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I don't want to be "preachy" or anything, but -- for your future benefit as well as the future benefit of anyone else reading this thread who takes the same risks -- any data that can't be replaced and that is very important to you must be backed up. And not just to another danged hard drive. Stuff happens. I've seen a lightning strike blow 4 drives in two machines at the same moment. The person using those two machines depended upon them for his business records. He had no external backups. He's the guy for whom I found the data recovery service. He would have lost his business without the data, so he was forced to pay mucho denaro for data recovery.
To take out my data, you'd have to take out two Internet data backup sites, my home office, my work office, and a safety deposit box. Maybe your data doesn't mean as much to you as mine does to me. But you need to do whatever it takes to safeguard the data to the extent that its value makes reasonable.
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If there's more information you can give us, or if you're able to get any response out of the drive at all, please post the information here to see if anyone can help. BUT, if the drive does activate, be very careful about how you access it. You do NOT want to boot with it if you can help it. If there's a file system problem, you must realize that most operating systems (You didn't specify which it was.) write to the hard drive at boot time, and quite frequently thereafter, too. If the file system is messed up you may be overwriting your data. So, any attempts to get the thing working again should be, if at all possible, with that drive NOT in the position to be a boot drive. Good luck on getting your data back.
- Collin
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