I'm no stranger to failed drives, in fact the amount that I shred on a weekly basis because they've failed is rather gut wrenching

Although this is the first real time its happened to me on my PC. There's quite a bit of important data on it, unfortunately I didn't back it all up, my defence is that I backed up other things but I couldn't afford to buy another 1TB HDD at the time to clone this one for the back up, poor excuse I know but I just never got around to copying my data

Anyway, as I said I'm fairly confident its dead. however I am not 100% what precisely could be wrong. I have been doing a bit of research and obviously it could be any number of things.

Essentially it worked fine yesterday, no issues, hadn't been making any noises in the past few weeks..
This morning I turn up my machine and it takes a good 5/10 mins to get into windows (I have a crucial m4 as my O/S drive so I realised something was wrong)
When I got in I browsed around and it got stuck trying to scan the recycling bin for a delete (I'd got some stuff from that drive in the bin)
I decided to restart and I got the same issues, only this time I noticed I couldn't physically access the drive via my computer, it showed up it just wouldn't go.
3rd Restart, it doesn't show up at all, at this point I think, ah well, the drives dying, oh shit. I take the side of the case and there's no noise.
4th restart with the intent to get into the bios to see if its there, I hear the drive spin up as per usual, then make a quiet'ish' noise, and it no longer appears in the bios, windows boots up super quick and I notice its now no longer recognised.

At this point, I've got a drive which spins up, makes a noise but stays spun up, isn't recognised in bios/windows/linux

I'd like to recover the data but I'm not sure the best way of going about it. Its not recognised in any way so I can't think of a way to quickly clone the drive, I don't really want to start thinking about replacing the PCB unless it seems like it might work.

I couldn't care less about the drive at this point. i'd be happy enough for a 1 time access, retrieve data, then treat the drive to some hammer therapy.

I realise at some point I might have to weigh up value of contents vs value of professional recovery. But I figured I'd start somewhere and see if I can get any good ideas or verification of my thoughts.

thanks for any help you guys can provide

Try it on another PC . If still not recognised, hangs PC at POST etc. , it's an internal problem and there's nothing you can do. You can check also on another PC with MHDD under DOS with SATA in compatibility mode. Likely, if it is what I think , the drive is NOT seen scanning ports.
Otherwise, carefully inspect everything. Must be the less common "flavor" of the typical HD103 failures (the common ones are stuck busy or spindown after start).

Before you ask, if this is the scenario it's not the PCB , there are NO free tools to diagnose (correctly) the problem, NO "firmware update" will revive it. Either accept the loss and carry on or seek professional help.

Thanks I'll give that ago,

and no don't worry, I realise proper diagnosis requires money so as I said I'm annoyed about it but I realise that to get what I really want it'll cost money.
I just wanted to, to check with the experience of you guys, if you'd had one or two ideas that might be worth trying before I bite the bullet and decided if it was worth the cost to get it professionally restored

u supposed to backup from the 1st. retry
for now

you have to pay for your school fee

good luck

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Kuwait Data Recovery - UNIX GTC
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once. By: Albert Einstein

Yeah sadly it wasn't obvious it was failing/failed until it wasn't recognised anymore. In my defence the drive had been fine, no errors, SMART had been healthy (I'd checked recently to look at one of my SSD's and I'd looked at all drives while I had the programme open)

Going to order a new drive on Tuesday (next working day in the UK) before I attempted to turn it on again in another machine, as if its accessible I want to start making copies of the content straight away, not risk powering it down again.

Anyone know a good company for data recovery if that fails for the UK? seems to be a lot out there all with rather vague websites. (I realise a lot if case by case basis for the cost, but some info seems copy pasted from other sites and the sites seem like they are from the 90's)

You have a wide choice. If you don't mind crossing the borders I can help too especially on Samsung. The 'plus' , depending on what the actual failure is, is the possibility of complete refurbishing of the drive like it was factory new except for the mechanical working time (can't turn back the clock... yet!) after a successful data recovery .

I would go with the Guru on Samsung and this one is BlackST. He is good and knows Samsung and can give you back a drive that you can use again.

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Iorana Haraharaini

+1 for BlackST for the Samsungs.

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