I think my harddrive is dead, but I need more options and things to try before I completely write it off.

It's been having minor issues the last few weeks that had me convinced it need to be reformatted, which is what I was getting ready to do. Acting as though it has no drive upon boot (NOTE: It's done this plenty over it's life so far, it's not out of the ordinary, just an annoyance that fixes itself after restarting again), crashing and running chkdisk (that in itself is something that's usually rare, but I've seen it happen twice in the last two weeks, and the last time it seemed to find quite a few problems, but I couldn't confirm where they were, or if there were even ON the harddrive in question. Some of the findings pointed towards my external drive), ZERO unusual noises, and no real oddities beyond what's I've mentioned. In fact, it's spent a good part of the last month now in hibernation, because I've been doing more with my laptop.

Last night I pulled it out of hibernation around 7 45 so I could watch Stargate. Booted up fine, no issues at all, ran until 10 15ish and then I put him back into hibernation.

Just a little while ago, I go to boot him up to make preparations to backup. It hangs at a black screen, seemingly after detecting the drive, and before booting windows. Restart. All seems well again, Resuming from Hibernation. He stalls 3/4ths of the way through the progress bar. Not so good. Restart again, drive not detected, please insert system disk. Restart again, drive is found, last resume unsuccessful, press enter to delete restore data and go to boot menu. I press enter, black screen, waited for 3 minutes and nothing happened. Restart AGAIN, no system disk, and it's been that way ever since. I've checked cables, confirmed it's nothing else, because I have another drive in there that boots to Vista, and it came up just fine. This drive isn't even powering up from what I can tell, and I know the cables are good.

If there's a silver lining to any of this, and it really is dead... it's that some of the more important information was transfered to my laptop so I'd have it wherever I went. Thus it's backed up already. However, that's approximately 1/16th of my data. There's plenty on this drive that I can't just redownload or easily replace. That probably goes without saying though.

Help?

Thought of trying to slave it to another drive, but if it's not powering up, there's no point. As long as I can get it into Windows again, in ANY form, I'll be happy.

Try in in a different PC, or failing that a different IDE channel. Your MoBo's IDE controller could be gone too. Have windows been trying to run chkdsk at startup?

It really sounds like either the HDD's controller is bad, in which case you're screwed, or your MoBo's controller is gone.

Cables and IDE Controller are fine. There's a separate drive with Vista in the same computer. I plugged it in with the same power and IDE cable I'm using with my XP drive. Booted up as expected.

Because of that, I'm not seeing much of a reason to try another computer. Power supply is good, motherboard is fine, booting into Vista pretty much proved that. If the drive isn't getting power here, why would it be different elsewhere?

It hasn't been trying to run chkdsk at startup unless there's been a system crash, or one of the programs went splat while I was shutting down. Trillian likes to do that on occasion. It hangs, I tell it to end program when windows notifies me, next reboot it might run chkdsk.

Seriously, it just seems to have upped and died for no apparent reason. Unless there were FAINT warning signs I completely missed.

Yeah, the controller board on your HDD is probably gone then. No real feasible way to get your data back either then. Dust it off, whack it a bit, and try slaving it a few times to see if you can still get some data off of it.

You did try swapping molex connectors too, right?

Yup. Swapped out every connection I could think of.

Out of curiosity, would there be visible signs as to why it's kicked the bucket? I'm assuming this is the board under the drive, yes? Would it also be safe to assume that "whacking" was not meant to be taken literally? =P

So with this diagnosis, my data is, essentially, just fine, all there, in one piece, but I cannot access it, because the controller board has decided to die.

If you have another, similar drive, you may be able to transplant the platters into it and recover your data. Google for articles on this.

Yeah. No thanks. I'm not nearly brave enough to even attempt that.

I think you need a clean room for that.

According to the few articles I pulled up, it's definitely preferable, but not entirely necessary if you're extremely careful. And this only fixes the drive enough to quickly recover data.

UPDATEORZ

I seem to have performed Voodoo Magiks on my drive.

Before giving up for the night, I figured I might as well completely yank it from the case and give it a look over. Wiped a fine layer of dust off the top, looked it over, saw no damage, then proceeded to disconnect the circuit board from the drive and look over the bottom of it. Again, no damage. Reconnect everything, plug it back into the computer, and for the hell of it, power it up, expecting absolutely nothing.

It resumed from hibernation.

Frantically I plug my keyboard and mouse back in, and right now, I'm furiously moving all my data to my freshly wiped external drive. It'll all fit, then I can move the external to my laptop, and burn DVD Archives.

The real question now... Was this a fluke? Do I dare trust this drive still? Do I dare turn the computer OFF tonight? To err on the side of caution, I think I'm still going to drop 120 bucks on that 500 gig drive I spotted earlier today on NewEgg. Can't hurt, and I need more storage anyway. Assuming my current drive is still good, I'll delegate it to being a slave.

You could have reseated a loose connector, or it could have been a fluke.

Definitely voodoo

I'm thinking fluke now. Got all my data last night, left it running just in case I remembered something in the morning I'd forgotten. After deciding I had everything, I rebooted, came right back up. Shut down and restarted, came right back up. Shut down again and firmly secured the drive again and reconnected all my fans and put the panels back on the case, turned it on, booted up fine.

I still don't trust it... If I knew exactly what happened and how I seemed to have fixed it I'd feel alot better. I also checked Samsung's website and looked up warranty information on my drive. I'm still covered under warranty for at least another 2 months (3 year warranty), so I'm considering sending it in. Probably not worth it though if I'm going to be getting 500 gig of storage soon anyway.

Send it to me, I'll take it!

Like a say completely unsurprising. Somewhere, a connection between the cables and the platters is loose/bad. I would back up your data asap, because it's just going to do it again, given enough time. Whacking it or fooling with it will probably still work for awhile, but eventually it's going to completely bite the dust.