SATA Hard drive is dead

[bstewart68]

I purchased a Dell Dimension 4600 with a 160gb SATA Western Digital
drive (Windows XP Pro SP2) two years ago. The PC suddenly locked up, I
rebooted and got the dreaded "Disk Read Error Press Cntrl-Alt Del to
reboot". The hard drive frequently makes a high pitched whinning
noise. When i touch the drive it is vibrating..so I think it is
spinning.

I checked all the cables reseated all of the DIMMs and cards...no luck.

I verified the BIOS settings were OK and that I had the latest version
installed..no luck
I put the drive in another PC as a slave..no luck.
I purchased SpinRite 6.0..It said the partition is on the size it
should be and can not continue.
I purchased a new Maxtor 200gb SATA drive, installed XP..no issues.

When I add the old drive to the secondary SATA the PC takes a long time
to boot. The old drive does not show up in XP. However, it is
detected in the BIOS.

Any other suggestions on what i should do other than chuck it out the
window?

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Check that the warranty hasn't still gotten a year to run?

 

[Richard Urban]

Hammer, blow torch and hydraulic press (Terminator) come to mind!

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Mike Hall \(MS-MVP\)]

Just so long as the process doesn't cover those little vents, otherwise it
is lost forever, and the warranty will be void..

 

[Bob Harris]

If you have valuable data on the disk, you might send it to one of those
data recovery services. The better ones can transfer the disk platter to a
new box (new motor, new controller) and read data. That assumes the platers
are not physically damaged. However, such services are not cheap. But,
some will not chrage you if they can not recover significant files.

Try a Google search on "hard drive recovery".

 

[coal_brona]

Hi,

You can try Active@ partition recovery tool. that might really help in
such a situation. When I've used it before it never failed me.

http://www.partition-recovery.com/