Dead Disk?

[bJN]

Turn the PC on earlier to check some emails, and I'm annoyingly presented with a rather unwelcome message during post.

Pri Slave   Hard Disk:S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD, Backup and Replace
No IDE Master H.D.D. Detected!
Press F1 to Resume

After a few searches through google, I've come to the conclusion that it's dead - it as an aging old Maxtor Diamondback 21 IDE drive after-all!

The only problem is, is there was a fair amount of data on there which I'd rather not lose (namely music, as all my photos and such are online anyway) as they'll take a LONG time to get back - all the games and such like (sad I know).

I'm guessing there's pretty much nothing that can be done apart from getting a new hard drive? Annoyingly will mean I'll have to spend £100+ on a new drive and an OS (can't find my old XP disk) which isn't preferable. I've heard about whacking the drive in a vacuum-bad and sticking it the freezer overnight and then trying to recover the data, and it does supposedly work, it's just also a bit more hassle than I'd like to go through as well...

Thoughts?

(And rants about "making sure to keep backups" aren't appreciated either)

 

[bJN]

OK this has bemused me - turned it off and juts checked the jumpers on the back of that and my DVD drive, and just removed them both, restarted and it's booted straight back into Windows (although there is no Master Drive so I have to manually boot every time which is annoying).
Now I haven't physically touched the jumpers since the drive went into the system when I built it many a year ago, so what the hell is going on here...

 

[Philtor]

Could the HDD controller on the way out perhaps which might explain why it's not detected one moment and is the next. Either way I would start to backup your data now when it's working