Is my harddrive dead?!? Help!!!

[redwings3030]

I have a Western Digital 160 Gb HDD that was working fine up until yesterday afternoon. I began to try and access a file on the drive from another computer on the network and ???, it was gone. I switched over to the actual machine that the drive is on and the machine was locked up so I rebooted. After rebooting and logging in, the drive had completely disappeared from the list of drives. I went into Disk Management and the drive wasn't there either!! So I turned it off, opened up the case and unplugged the power and plugged another power lead into the drive and rebooted again. The drive spins up and is recognized by the BIOS, but when it boots into Windows, it is unable to be seen. I pulled the drive out and put it into another machine and the same thing happens. The BIOS sees the drive but when it boots into Windows, the OS doesn't find it. I'm running 2K Server on the original machine and XP SP2 on the 2nd machine I tried it on. Another item of note, the drive is not making any wierd noises (clicking, grinding, whirring) so I don't believe it to be an internal parts problem, but who knows? I need any assistance on this as this drive held TONS of important documents, video, media, etc and I'm pretty sure I can't afford to pay for data recovery at the moment. Anyone have any ideas? Any and all help is appreciated.

 

[montag451]

Firstly, don't panic.
I've got 60gigs of really important stuff backed up onto one CD - that is how important the important stuff is.
So, slap your wrists for not backing up.

See if you can try something like SPINRITE6 - has a very good reputation for recovering data.
If it shows up in BIOS, that is a good sign, though not definitively brilliant, it is better than not showing in BIOS.
Let us know how it goes.

If you wait around, there might be some better ideas as to the cure though.

 

[boshuter]

I've got 60gigs of really important stuff backed up onto one CD

Now that's quite a trick.. maybe you can share how you did that?

 

[montag451]

Yeah - i only backed up the stuff that REALLY IS IMPORTANT

 

[redwings3030]

You're totally right, and I have slapped the crap out of myself for not backing up. I haven't tried the Spinrite thing yet, but I had a guy recommend something to me. He said to try getting ahold of an HDD as close as possible to the problematic one (same size, either Maxtor or WD, etc) and swap out the system board on the drive with the bad one on my current drive. I'm planning on trying this but I'm combing ebay to see if I can find one that someone is selling that's bad (click of death, etc). One can find just about anything on ebay so it's worth the wait if I can save $70. If not, then I guess I'll just have to wait till I can save up the cash for data recovery. EEEK!! I'll keep you guys posted and keep the ideas coming if anyone has any more!! Thanks!!!

 

[daniel49]

Originally posted by: boshuter

I've got 60gigs of really important stuff backed up onto one CD

Now that's quite a trick.. maybe you can share how you did that?

No I think he means how did you get 60 gb data on a 700 mb disc

 

[moonsite]

I have a drive that can't be seen with winxp, but when I plug into a machine with win2k on it, I was able to set a drive letter in disk management. Then the drive showed up. Maybe you should try that first if you have access to win2k machine.