Hello to all,
I have a hdd as described above, which has failed. Any attempts to access the drive returns a "cyclic redundancy check" error. I purchased a sata to USB cable, but I'm unable to access anything on the drive so far. Any ideas?

Your description is rather scarce. Do not use USB adapter, connect the drive directly to SATA. What happens / how the drive behaves then? How it failed?

As a generalized guess it's possible to surmise some kind of surface damage / degradation, but not the reasons of it.
Remember that DIY attempts can easily make the situation worse. If the data is important, stop and contact a professional data recovery company.

_________________
• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

+1

your description is too short for someone to understand the problem.

is drive detecting under BIOS or windows ?
is drive spinning at all ?
is drive producing a clicking or abnormal sound ?
what happen before the drive fail ?

_________________
Data Recovery Pakistan

Thank you Dmitri, for responding. I happened to be in a Fry's electronics store, and asked them to look at it. They looked at it for about a minute and just said no. I am of the belief that I think I will look for a 2nd opinion...

It sounds like it is spinning, nothing more soundwise. The only other thing is the cyclic redundancy error that it returns.

can BIOS or windows detect the hard drive ?
it can be a slow-response problem as mentioned by spildit

_________________
Data Recovery Pakistan