About a week ago my computer died--power supply and mobo were shot. I had a technician look at it and he said everything else worked. I specifically asked about the HD and he checked it out, stuck it in an external enclosure, said it worked. OK.

Wednesday afternoon, I spent the better part of three hours attempting to get the drive to work. I went back, read the install manual (it's an IBM Deskstar, which I know are prone to issues), checked the jumpers, cables, etc... nada. But during this, I went in to the BIOS and checked to see if it was noticing the drive. Well, the BIOS froze, which, I suppose why it froze at the bootup screen right after detecting the drives. Moreover, on the screen where it froze, it didn't list the number of sectors for the drive. Just to note, I did buy an external enclosure just to see if that would help. It didn't.

If anyone knows anything about hard drives and data recovery, please let me know. Are these symptoms of a complete head crash? Drive failure? Like the average user, very little was backed up, and I'd like to recover the documents. If the drive is recoverable, how much am I looking at to have someone recover data on there?

Blah.

I have only had a hard drive fail once. For some reason, it could still read the drive, but only in safe mode on Windows. If you do use Windows, give that a shot.

Here's a link that will explain how to re-start in Safe Mode for all Windows OS's:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ts ... #_Section4

Hard drive data recovery can get very expensive, and most times you'll have to pay with no guarantee of them being able to recover anything. Chances are, if your power supply and mo-board are shot, then your hard drive is probably fried, even if it did work for a couple days. I remember reading something about freezing them, maybe someone else knows more about that.

I had not thought of this. I'll give it a go this evening.



Yeah, I'm pretty strapped for cash at the moment. I did some Googling and the freezer thing is legit to an extent, apparently. Not recommended, but for the truly desperate. I'm wondering of the logic board is fried? Hrmm...

Thanks for the suggestions.