I am fixing a computer for my neighbor and was greeted with a "4th master hard disk error" message from the BIOS when starting the computer (motherboard is ASUS M2N68-AM SE2 Rev2). The BIOS doesn't detect the HDD at all. I tried the drive in another computer with the same results. The drive spins up and doesn't make any odd noises...it just isn't recognized by the computer.

I have fairly good computer skills, but from what I have read so far, this isn't something that can be fixed without special equipment & knowledge. Is there anything I can do to try to get the data off this drive?

If not, can anyone recommend a individual or company in or around Wisconsin that can help me? Any idea what the data recovery might cost?

Thanks.

There is a multitude of things that you can "try" to help diagnose your issue.

If the data is important and you are not confident with DR methods send it to a pro. With that said, heres a few things you can try on your own.

*disclaimer - you can damage a drive further by running unnecessary tools/utilities causing more damage then there already is *

With that said:

If the drive spins and is not detected at bios you can try a utility called MHDD. I suggest you put this drive into a separate computer that has
a known good ide/sata controller.

Remove all drives from the pc except the one your trying to diagnose.

A start would be downloading and burning MHDD, burn it to a cd and boot off of that and attempting to detect the drive. (F2 i believe).
(MHDD has alot of commands and options but the first few things you can try is detecting/resetting the drive)

http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

Another utility you can try is "test disk" / "photorec" a free open source program for fixing/diagnosing partitions.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

You do not want to "WRITE" anything to the drive but sometimes photorec and testdisk can be great tools to help recover/read and diagnose certain drive flaws and issues.

Report back with any findings and i'll see how i can help you out.

Thanks for the suggestions...I really appreciate the help.

I connected the bad HDD to a known good computer and booted using Magic Boot Disk on CD. I ran MHDD and tried to detect the drive on the secondary controller (port 170h). All I got was the message "drive not ready". I rebooted and tried this again with the same results. At this point I touched the drive and noticed there was no vibration...it was not spinning. I rebooted and found the drive spun for about 15 seconds when the computer first powered up and then it stopped. It then spun intermittently as the system was booting off CD but stopped once it came to the DOS prompt. The drive did not spin at all when MHDD was run again.

I also tried to run TestDisk. It did show one drive but the capacity was noted 30-137GB (I can't remember exactly, but it was somewhere in that general range). This was not correct so I exited the program. At this point I called it a night...

Does this provide any other clues as to what might be wrong with the drive.

Drive is likely to have other issues. It can be a board issue, firmware, or combination. Need professional help.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I would vote also for FW or physical issues.
I recommend jono-ats and quasimodo, they are both from the US, not sure which one is near you.