hello

my problem started few months ago, the PC started failing to boot to windows and i had to keep restarting it until it boots.
i went to bios several times, when the PC failed to boot, and i saw that the HDD wasn't recognized!
i discovered that sometimes the HDD doesn't get detected , and as a result the PC fail to boot to windows. but when the HDD get recognized it will work just fine!
the problem started happening more often , and lately it became extremely hard to get the PC to boot! so i kept the pc on all the time.
the PC became very slow lately even after i restart it , and games started to lag , so i decided to overclock it (i have a quad code CPU with 4 gigs of ram) , so when i overclocked it and saved the settings in bios and exit it, it automatically shut down the PC and turned on immediately. the result was that the HDD didn't get recognized , and since then i couldn't get it recognized (i restored the bios settings after few minutes of restarting the PC ).. and after that i literally kept restarting it for HOURS but i couldn't get it recognized..
so i desperately took an old 80 gigs IDE HDD from my old PC and put it in my computer and installed windows on it .
my plan was to boot in windows using the 80 gigs HDD and hopefully get the 320 gigs recognized in windows as drive D so i can get my data from it, but that didn't do it.
so i disconnected the 320gigs HDD , and then i felt my pc started running much faster , especially the boot process when i turn it on, and opening bios as well, (that process was very slow when the 320gigs HDD was connected), i guess its because the computer was trying to read it..

i have no idea what caused the problem and how i can recover my data now! (the weird thing is that it gets detected when it wants to , and when it does , it will work just fine)

i connected the HDD to the computer while i was holding it in my hand and then turned the PC on , i could feel it spinning while the PC was booting , it stopped spinning after short time of starting windows (while already on windows' desktop) , then i tried disconnecting the HDD's power cable then reconnecting it , it started spinning again, but didn't get recognized ..

here is a picture of the HDD for all the info you need:
http://img824.imageshack.us/img824/793/28072011074.jpg

any help would be greatly appreciated
thanks

need a better diagnosis, but you can start by researching MHDD. See if the drive recognizes first. After check SMART and then run a scan to see how degraded the drive is.

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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

These drives are infamous for head issues. But, there is a small chance that it might also be a common Western Digital PCB issue. That being said, without the right tools, you are fighting an up hill battle. You would be wise to have it assessed by a data recovery pro.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

i need some help with MHDD..
i went here http://hddguru.com/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/
and downloaded "Last version of MHDD, CDROM iso-image" .. i extracted the iso file from the zip file, and opened it but there was nothing but a readme file, despite the fact that the iso file is larger than 1mb
so i downloaded "Magic Boot Disk with MHDD" and burned the content of the iso file to a cd and tried to boot from the cd but it didn't boot. now i have no idea how i can boot to MHDD. i don't have a floppy disk drive.

by the way , when i entered bios a few minutes ago to change the boot priorities , i saw that the HDD is detected there (in bios), but it didn't boot to windows, and when i restarted the computer to enter bios again (after the boot failure of both the HDD and CD) it was gone ..

another interesting thing: the IDE drive stopped getting detected as well! its 4 years old. is it just a coincidence or there is something more than that ? could it be the PSU giving more voltage and ruining them ? (to be honest i started getting afraid to buy a new HDD and use it on my PC now!)
i tried the 320GB HDD today morning on another computer and it didn't get detected as well (so i don't think its a motherboard issue)

i took advantage of the fact that it was detected in bios and i tried using windows' repair tools (using windows installation cd)
so i tried in the beginning to "repair problems thats not allowing windows to boot" , but it didn't read the HDD , so i restarted the pc and entered windows installation again, and tried to install a new windows on the HDD, but i got this:
http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/1840/30072011075.jpg
so then i went to bios to load default settings ( i doubt its the problem) , but unfortunately the HDD was gone then, so i loaded default settings and turned the computer off..

I guess heads have problems here from this.



did this identify itself correctly?

I guess it is possible that there is problems with the service area, specifically overlay failure which is very common in this series, but as you state that it is unable to maintain spindle rotation (it powers down) it is more likely the internal heads are damaged.

In either case, data recovery is not recoverable via DIY, only a pro can get your data back now.