I think my hardrive has died, seeking a second opinion

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Guest

Here's the story.
About 6 months ago my PC started making an odd noise, which I decided was
the fan, but it turns out it was most likely the hardrive bearings grinding,
oops, mistake number 1.

Last week the system started glitching, so I did the
defrag/drivers/virus/adware checks which didn't really do much good, so after
researching further found a .wav file that indicated the bearing noise
problem. Realising that it'd been slowly destroying my HDD for the last 6
months I ordered an external to run a belated backup onto (another dumb
mistake I know) and a new internal HDD as a replacement. Unfortunately it
appears they've arrived too late as the system now refuses to start at all.
I'm not even getting the BIOS screen, so I'm suspecting that it's cashed in
it's chips. Dust removal had no effect, and neither did gentle shaking,
tapping, prayer and as a final resort I even tried 'freezing' the drive, but
still nothing.

I've tried swapping the drive physically to another machine (this one) but
no joy, I've also tried swapping the hardrive from this old system into the
current one, but got no results. I suspect it's because as this is my
previous model it's only running Win98 instead of XP, and it's not getting
the expected files/OS. Am I right with that at least?

Because the original HDD is ATA and the new one is SATA I also got a host
PCI card, but as I can't get the system to boot I have no way of installing
the drivers for the card, and therefore can't install the drive. (Muppet, I
didn't think of that)

So, the big question firstly is, have I pushed the old drive bearings too
far and the unit is useless? Is there any way to recover it's data?

And secondly, how can I install the new SATA drive/card? If it comes right
down to it, the system is 3 years old and I know I can replace it and
transfer the upgraded graphics card etc to the new model and drop the new
SATA drive straight into it, but I'd prefer to dodge the expense for a while
at least.

Thanks in advance for any help and advice.
 
Amazing Jim wrote:

Answers inline, with snippage:
About 6 months ago my PC started making an odd noise, which I decided was
the fan, but it turns out it was most likely the hardrive bearings
grinding, oops, mistake number 1.
Click to expand...

Your hard drive has died. Nothing you do from any software position -
Windows 98, Windows XP, whatever - is going to work. It's dead. You should
have pulled your data immediately the very first time you heard the noise.
Because the original HDD is ATA and the new one is SATA I also got a host
PCI card, but as I can't get the system to boot I have no way of
installing the drivers for the card, and therefore can't install the
drive. (Muppet, I didn't think of that)
Click to expand...

If you want a SATA drive, you'll need a floppy drive so you can put a floppy
in with the SATA drivers during the XP install (F6). If your machine
doesn't have a floppy drive, either buy an internal one or an external usb
drive. Make sure your BIOS will allow you to see usb devices before an
operating system is loaded. Since your machine is only 3 years old, it
probably can.

Otherwise, take the SATA drive and the controller card back to where you got
them and buy a new IDE drive. Install Windows per usual.
So, the big question firstly is, have I pushed the old drive bearings too
far and the unit is useless? Is there any way to recover it's data?
Click to expand...

The drive is dead. If you want the data, you'll need to send the drive to a
professional data recovery company. You've messed with it so long that even
they may have a hard time recovering the data, but if it's crucial then
it's worth a try. I prefer Drive Savers, but there are other companies such
as Ontrack and Seagate. Those companies' services usually start at around
$500USD and go up from there. Only you can determine the value of your
data.

DriveSavers - http://www.drivesavers.com
Seagate Data Recovery Services - https://www.seagatedatarecovery.com/
http://www.ontrack.com

Malke
 
I once had a similar problem, except there was no warning sign. My
hard drive suddenly started grinding and stopped working. I called
Drive Savers, but they said it would cost $1000 to recover the data.
My data wasn't particularly important, so I left it alone.

I was able to get my hard drive to work about five minutes each time I
froze it in the freezer. I bought a new hard drive, booted into DOS,
and copied files over from my broken hard drive. Then, I froze my HD
again and copied over some more data. And I did this until I had
enough of my important stuff backed up. With the frozen hard drive,
the transfer rate was slow and some files were corrupted, but I was
still able to get my most critical files.

What brand is your hard drive? Mine was a Quantum, and I've heard that
Quantums are very problematic. My uncle had a Quantum drive that
literally melted in his computer (he could smell plastic burning and
saw black burn marks).
 
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