my first posting in this forum... i'm feeling nervous... i'm DUMB when it comes to hardware..

ok, ysterday, i turned on my pc and it start making a funny sound, and i realized that the sound is from the harddisk, it sound like the motor in the drive blocked by something, so the windows won't load, hell even bios didn't detect my hard drive... so anyone xperienced this befor?? can you guys point out what should i do??

changing my harddisk won't b a problem but what i worry most is my valuable data( some gigas of pron !!! ) in the drive and my projects... is there a way to retruieve the data from the harddrive???

Any help appreciated.. thanks.

What a coincidence! I am just recovering from losing my PC over the weekend. Last Friday, I switched on my PC and bam! and it burst like a really loud firecracker!

EVRYTHING got fried, even my HDD - which means I lost all my data of 4 years. Right now I am breaking in a new PC but having discussed my burnt HDD with the technician, he suggested replacing the card of the HDD (I don't know the correct term for it but it's that green board stuck behind the HDD usually) to see if he can salvage the data at least.

Maybe you should take the HDD to the distributor and see what they can do.

haaah just when I thought I'm the only unlucky one..

I hop the IMBI guys could at least save my precious data, I spend lots of time to download those movies and serials and programs.. and that the only leisure I have, and even that taken away from me, the world seems to be really boring....

I just managed to buy a 80Gig HDD from a friend at for RM170, thats cheap right?? even in Lowyat its RM 220+ i checked..

If you want to try something, goto www.grc.com and see if Gibson Research's Spinrite will help you recover your data. I don't know how damaged your drive is, but you may be able to salvage something. It's worth a shot. <shrug>

Depends, is it new? Brand? Warranty 1 or 5 years?

new maxtor no warranty...

No warranty??? Are you nuts? hehehe...

'Warranty terms' is the number one question you should ask before buying a certain HDD. Then look at the price, how big (e.g. 80GB), how fast (7200 RPM ATA/133) and the buffer size (e.g. 8MB). Brand is not really important - it's just clever marketing.

Finally I took your advice as it somehow makes sense to buy one with a warranty even if its a litle expensive compared to the othwer,

I end up buying a Maxtor 120 Gig HDD...

There are many data recovery businesses that can recover stuff from dead hard drives - they are usually VERY expensive though.