Why, God?

[sjt269]

Directly copied and pasted from my post on another forum (cba typing it out the same again):


First of all, excuse the typing errors, this isn't my PC, and the keyboard is rubbish.



Well, I've been putting off getting a new hard drive and sorting through my old one for a few weeks now, never had the money to spare. Looks like God has a sense of humour; he's just killed my hard drive. An 80Gb IBM Deskstar that's been with me for about 3 years has just failed to work.

I was playing KOTOR earlier fine, then it suddenly froze during a level load. I'd been hearing some wierd whirring noises from the PC for a few days, and I thought nothing of it (I thought it was the CD drive, it's pretty temperamental). I go back to turn it on about an hour ago, and it asks me for a system disk. Things started to go wrong at this point...

The long and the short of it is that the PC can no longer see the Deskstar HDD; it doesn't pick it up during POST, in the BIOS, or in the Windows Setup. It's connected fine, to the right cables, but all it does is whir menacingly when the PC tries to access it. It works up to a point with another old 10Gb HDD (shows up in the BIOS and everything), but within the last 20 minutes or so, it's stopped reading the Windows setup disk with that HDD, so I can't get any further.

I think it's dead, but I feel the need to try everything humanly possible to retrieve the data or repair the HDD before I consign it to the scrapyard in the sky. As you can imagine, over 3 years, it has a lot of files on it that are important to me, though not vital to the survival of the human race or anything so serious as that. I'd like them back though.


So...any ideas, no matter how remote the possibility of the PC working again is?


Thanks
tTz


PS: This keyboard sucks.

 

[sjt269]

try to find another drive the same as that one (working) and take the card off the bottom of it, replace the one on your dead drive with that,

this MAY fix it, but its a maybe!

Does it have to be the same type of drive? (perhaps a stupid question, but I'm clutching at straws here)

I have two old 10Gb drives lying about the house, and I wouldn't mind sacraficing them if I could try to retrieve some data, even if it would only work long enough for me to copy some files onto CD before it gave up again.

Thanks for the link to the other thread, but I'm not sure that would work. The guy in the thread lost a partition, while it looks like my HDD has mechanically stopped working. Annoying would be an understatement.



:edit:

Also, I didn't have the opportunity to search or read any other threads last night, as my broadband connection died a silent death as well, and has only just come back to life. Took me half an hour to post this thread last night (not including typing the message) because of it.

:edit2:

Spoke too soon, connection randomly going again. It's really not my day/week/month.

 

[sjt269]

Got a new drive this morning. RIP important data from the last one.