Primary Slave Hard Disk Fail

[EM64T]

Well, I had a client send me a hard drive that I told him was a goner, but he wanted me to try and recover the data on it. I slapped in on the Primary Slave, and I get the error:

PRIMARY SLAVE HARD DISK FAIL

When that error message comes up the BIOS sees the drive as

SAMSUNG BOOTCODE - V8 HDD (ULTRA ENGINE) UE100-06

However, powering off the computer, then powering it back on the BIOS may/may not see the drive (it's random). Even thought the BIOS recongnizes the HDD and gives the me the error, I cannot get the BIOS to load the drive. To my knowledge short of spending a few grand the HDD is completely gone and beyond my skill to recover. I just want to know if possibly there is anything I can try software or hardware wise...

 

[BuckeyeComputers]

The intermitant showing up then not showing up sounds like a controller chip problem... it might be possible to find a new board and replace it to see if that will work..

 

[EM64T]

I don't think the price of getting a new board for this hard drive (it's an older re-branded Samsung) would be worth the time, effort, and money to track it down. That is an idea though, I wasn't aware that you could replace the boards on hard drives...