*sighs* It was bound to happen

[LA_MERC_LaTech]

Ok...here's the deal...

I woke up this morning, started some MP3's and went abotu getting ready for work. I called my gf and talked to her for about 15 min and went back in the computer room to change the song (it was quiet). I clicked on a song, and then noticed the wonderful noise that I had been dreading since I built this computer - The click of death. Yes...that's right...my MP3 hard drive (with roughly 5000+ mp3's (all legal, of course)) hosed itself.

After saying a few choice words, I shut down my computer and unhooked the 80 GB hard drive (piece of crap). I rebooted the computer...and it says: "Disk boot failure" blah blah blah. Oh hell. My main hard drive is a SATA 74GB Raptor. It's the BOOT hard drive, with the OS and everything on it. All my stories (I have another good one to post...assuming I can get it back). All my games. All my pictures (of trips I've been on recently). So, I decided that apparently, the system needed a hard drive on there that was an ATA HD so that it could boot SATA (which it was doing before). I have a spare 40 GB and I hooked it up. "Disk Boot Failure..." Joy.

Normally, I don't think it would be that much of a problem. I usually can think things through without problem...but this morning, I was just so frustrated that I shut everything down and came to work.

Does ANYONE have any ideas? I'm considering putting the FUBAR HD in the freezer to see if I can extract some data from it (I read once that it is supposed to work). Any idea why the SATA one won't work? Anything?!

LaTech

[zulu]

ouch, hard drive crashing sucks. when my bro's maxtor crashed a while back we tried a lot of things with no luck. The freezer was one of them. I think that's sort of last ditch though so you might hold off until you get some other ideas. We even found a couple websites that said try dropping it from about 4ft (making sure it lands flat)...but that's even more last ditch than the freezer (didn't work either).

as for your sata drive, it would be unlikely for both of those drives to go fubar at the same time. Have you checked bios to make sure it is set to only boot from the sata drive?

[LA_MERC_LaTech]

Yes, it's Serial only (others are disabled). I know freezer is last ditch, usually...but I've always wanted to do it anyway (laughs).

[zulu]

lol, my bro and I thought it was kind of humorous to put it in the freezer too. We tried everything though he had lots of music compositions on there that we were trying to get back. He's saving the drive and hopes to have enough money to pay an expert to take a crack at it someday.

[zulu]

btw, about your sata drive. I'm sure you probably checked, but are you positive it's not the one that crashed? I don't think it should need an IDE drive running for it to boot properly. If it's set to sata only and windows is on that drive, it should boot.

[MindWerks]

Normally when one of my HD goes to hell and it has data on it I would like to recover I do one of several things.

First I will try to install the defective disk as a secondary drive on a spare PC and see if any data can be extracted. I have found that often the drive partially fails and data located on other cylinders can still be extracted. Sometimes you can get lucky and get what you need that way.

If that fails I have enough old drives about (usually I take the broken ones from work) so that I can find a drive of the same model and just crack it open and swap the spools. If done carefully and cleanly you can use the drive just about long enough to grab all the data off of it.

I have only tried the second way once (out of boredom and curiosity) and was surprised as hell that it worked so well.

If you have a scrap drive of the same make and model that could be worth trying. I think other then that you may be SOL.

[-=C.O.P.S=-KOrruptED]

If you want, you can go buy an external portable HD case and drop the drive in there, take it to work to see if you can read it.

[LA_MERC_Captain_Obvious]

maybe the bios got corrupted or the motherboard went bad. Dropping it sounds fun, but using an external enclosure sounds like a pretty easy test.

[LA_MERC_Nutria]

I heard soaking it in a bucket of salt water for 24 hours works wonders, but make sure you plug it in while it is still wet. :stick
I got nuthin

[-=C.O.P.S=-KOrruptED]

I have a SATA drive, not a nice fast Raptor, but it doesn't require an ATA HD to boot.
The only times I've had problems booting up was when my CPU overheated and gave me a BSOD, after turning the computer off for a minute it would boot back up.

[LA_MERC_LaTech]

Booted off Knoppix CD. Works fine. Can see the SATA HD and everything on it looks ok. other HD is FUBAR, though.

[Texas_Lawdog]

throw holy water on it ..that may work....