My hard drive crashed today and I have several gigabytes worth of coolness that I would like to save if possible.
When my computer boots, BIOS starts to go thru its normal routine and looks like it finds the hard drive at least initially:
"Auto detect 3rd master....IDE hard Drive."
Then the hard drive begins to click pretty loud and after the third click you can hear the drive powering down.
BIOS pauses for about 15 seconds and then continues to give me an error "Problem detected for 3rd master IDE hard drive." It then asks me to reboot from a new drive or use a boot disk.
This is repeatable.
I changed the primary boot drive to the DVD so I could see if I could select repair Win XP just to try to access the drive and it says there is no drive connected.
Geek Squad tried (for free - how nice) to access the drive with no results. They would send it off with a non-refundable deposit of $60 and then costs could be anywhere between $800 to $1500.
My buddy told me that it could be possible that it is the hard drive controller card. I could buy an exact model and swap out the controller card.
Anyone have experience with this route? I will have to buy a new drive anyway, but if there is still a *cheap* way of saving my data it would be nice.
When my computer boots, BIOS starts to go thru its normal routine and looks like it finds the hard drive at least initially:
"Auto detect 3rd master....IDE hard Drive."
Then the hard drive begins to click pretty loud and after the third click you can hear the drive powering down.
BIOS pauses for about 15 seconds and then continues to give me an error "Problem detected for 3rd master IDE hard drive." It then asks me to reboot from a new drive or use a boot disk.
This is repeatable.
I changed the primary boot drive to the DVD so I could see if I could select repair Win XP just to try to access the drive and it says there is no drive connected.
Geek Squad tried (for free - how nice) to access the drive with no results. They would send it off with a non-refundable deposit of $60 and then costs could be anywhere between $800 to $1500.
My buddy told me that it could be possible that it is the hard drive controller card. I could buy an exact model and swap out the controller card.
Anyone have experience with this route? I will have to buy a new drive anyway, but if there is still a *cheap* way of saving my data it would be nice.