hi guys one of my office machines (acer veriton m464) is driving me nuts! nine times out of ten on start up the hdd is not recognised and machine wont boot..this happens even if bootup is attempted with the recovery discs.The cmos set up page shows primary ide master/primary ide slave/sata primary master/sata primary slave not detected.I've remade the internal connections to no avail.The hdd is WD6400AAKS with plenty ofspace remaining.On the odd time it boots it all goes ok!The last time it worked I loaded wd's diagnostic prog but it failed to complete any test.Hope someone can help me out here before my payroll manager (who uses the machine) punches my lights out!! The machine has worked happily for 18 months or so. Happy Christmas!

Geoff,

It would seem reasonable that this system is important enough for you to stop messing with it before it is too late. You should seek the assistance of a data recovery professional to ensure that the data is recovered.

Good luck!

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Pull out the HDD and clone it to a new one to start off with. You keep this up and your chances are lost on this one. Never work with failing drives and force them to boot up and attempt to work again. Knoiw you need the data on this one but why force a failing drive to work. Would you drive your car on a very long trip if you knew you had problems with this one and it would die on you before getting to where you want to go. Same with your HDD it is telling you it needs help and needs to be replaced. Try looking at what is happening and stop playing around on this one. Stop installing stuff on this. Pull it out and read it from another computer and buy a new HDD and clone it to this one. Then try again .

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Iorana Haraharaini

thanks guys...sounds like sensible advice to me!