Sorry to hear it.

Sometimes you can bring back a disk though.

If it is only the boot sector damaged, you can remove the drive, install a new drive, install new operating system to the new drive, then put the old drive on the secondary channel. You might be able to copy files to the new drive.

Or, if the drive is not recognized, and you are up to it, remove the cover on the drive, and re-park the arm to the park position. Don't touch the platters, but inspect for dirt and dust, and use an air can to blow off acumulated debris. I once brought back an Apple SCSI drive this way.
***CAUTION*** your warranty will be voided***
Tommy P.

EDIT: if you have another computer, try the drive in it as a non bootable drive

OR......for 50 bucks you can get a program called Restorer2000 that scans the drive and finds the data for you and you can save it from there...but, you have to have a disk equal to or larger in size to recover the data to...
http://www.bitmart.net/r2k.htm

life savers I tell ta!!!
Opus

Thanks for the replies

I'll try the program in a few hours :-)

Hi
does anyone know if restorer2000 recovers fat32 drives?
Cheers

Umm...no it does not....another argument for going with the NTFS!!!
I looked to see if there was but the way that FAT32 works over NTFS makes it impossible to recover like that from a software program..That's what bit me as well...from now on I stay with NTFS!!!!!!!
Opus

Hi Opus

Thanks, I was afraid It wouldn't.
Maybe this is something you can put in your optimization docs

Cheers

If the data on the drive is important enough, http://www.ontrack.com might be able to recover it for a fee, probably a pretty big fee, but they're reportedly pretty good at it, even if they have to disassemble the platters out of the drive and read them with a piece of laboratory science equipment.

I lost a whole disk worth of irreplaceable stuff once, and that's why now I only run my personal computers with a matching pair of drives hooked up to a Promise raid card and mirror the disks (raid-1). The card is only about $85, and yeah it takes up a PCI slot and needs a dedicated IRQ to perform its best. The mirrored "drive" is a tad slower than a single drive on a dedicated IDE channel, but not all that much. It also costs twice as much for the disks of course. I spent $385 instead of the $150 of a 80GB single disk, to get my 80GB of fault-tolerant mirrored storage area, and I feel that the extra $235 and loss of a tiny bit of write performance (read performance seems virtually unaffected) is well worth the peace of mind it gives me.

What's the best and fastest way to back up a large hard drive? Why, to another large hard drive, of course. And what's more convenient than having a pair of drives in a perpetual state of constantly being backed up to one another?

I couldn't agree more, about a RAID mirror, I may get "back on the RAID horse", after a stripe set failure I had a while back.

I actually bought On Tracks recovery software, I remember it telling me the time to completion would be about 3 years for a 40Gb non-raid Maxtor :roll: ...A pop-up screen did offer to do an in house job for a fee, I didn't do it though.