Hard Drive failure of epic proportions!

[Cactuscat]

My 160 GB hard drive died, without warning, yesterday. Or, maybe it's not technically dead, I'm not sure...

Anyway, it now makes the oddest sound--not a click or clank, but a weird, double-note "buzz"? The computer will not boot with the drive physically attached. It also fails to recognize either hard drive if it's attached to the same cable as the Master HDD I have as my C drive.

Once it's unplugged, the C drive boots fine all the way to Windows and it runs perfectly. I plugged the "dead" drive into a separate IDE cable all by its lonesome and it resumed making its weird noise and the BIOS refused to detect it, but the comp still booted to Windows.

Once in Windows I detected for new hardware and Windows said it found it and was attempting to install it. However, the bad drive continued to buzz over and over and over and Windows was stuck, apparently unable to finish installing the drive.

I'm very desperate to get at _any_ data I can recover off this drive as it's my main work drive with all my important data on it. If anyone can help me figure this out, that'd be awesome!

 

[wolluf]

Suspect your only option is 'expensive' (though I have been contacted recently by a cheaper expensive recovery company - sample quote c. £250 in the UK to recover 80GB hard drive - best I'd got before was c. £700) professional data recovery (where they take the drive apart & mount platters elsewhere). You could try attaching to another machine (you do get different results from different machines sometimes) - or you could try data recovery software (eg, getdataback - which has a trial version to see if it can find anything) - which can work even when windows doesn't actually recognise the drive - but I'd doubt it from your description.

 

[PRPhx]

CactusCat,
Hopefully you have learned a lesson here: The importance of backing up important files and data! Either burn your data and files to a cd/dvd on a regular basis, add another hd just for backups, or add a tape drive and store important stuff there. Or look into storing data over the internet.

 

[Cactuscat]

The sad thing is, I was thinking the very day before it died, "Man, I'd better start backing some of this stuff up!"

I have a habit of thinking this shortly before hard drives die on me. Maybe one of these days I'll learn to listen to that inner voice and act on the impulse.

 

[kjv1611]

Or, maybe just quit thinking such thoughts!

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[tlcscousin]

Is the drive on an XP machine? If so if you can use a USB enclosure and have access to a Vista machine try seeing if Vista will see the contents.

I have found that sometimes an xp drive that xp wont see vista will see and conversly a vista drive that vista wont see xp will see.