Last night I was setting up movie night for the kids on my computer and ran into some display problems, so I rebooted. After waiting for the system to shut down for about 10 minutes (it was hung up on the exit screen), I pulled the plug. When I pushed the on switch, the computer hung up on the bios screen, then said there was a hard drive error. I tried again (and again) with the same results. I ended up pulling the hard drive and testing it on my laptop with a USB connection and the system wouldn't recognize it. I tried one more time with my ear up to it (on the floor) and it spins fine, even sounds like it's reading, but then goes silent (still spinning). There is no warranty on it (I checked). The only thing on it I might even be interested in is about 100+ GB of music, everything else of importance should be backed up through Mozy.

Are there any suggestions for possibly getting the data (music files) off?

It's really hard to tell, as someone experienced should make a proper diagnosis.

If you say that the drive is not recognized, probably means that the problem is not logical, but firmware or physical, so that needs to be treated by someone who knows what's doing.

IF the drive is not recognised connected directly to PC or show wrong capacity or recognised differently from the correct model (and doesn't work in any of these case) most probably it's firmware or heads and it's game over for DIY = get a new drive.

@Pokaholic:


If you accept the risk that any DIY carries some risk of the drive deteriorating, then I would attempt to get a better diagnosis than the BIOS is giving you. A "hard drive error" could be anything from media errors (where a DIY data recovery attempt may be possible, although has some risk), through to disk firmware, heads or something else not DIY (as BlackST mentioned).

The same ambiguity applies to this info:

Unfortunately "the system wouldn't recognize it" could mean different things.

To get an idea of how the drive identifies itself (disk model & capacity), you would need to put the disk back into the PC and attach it via SATA again. Then either look in the disk setup screen in your BIOS (is the drive model & capacity shown correctly there?), or use the MHDD tool (downloading the bootable ISO image from the files area of this forum is probably easiest to use, but can still require some BIOS settings to be changed before it will detect SATA disks).

After you have decided on the value of the non-backed up data, and whether you want to take the risk of attempting any diagnosis yourself (compared to getting a diagnosis from a DR company, but losing control of your disk in the process - and you need to use a reputable company), then that'll make your options a bit clearer.