Crashed hard drive, windows won't recognize it at all

[enturbulate]

Sadly my old (system)disk decided to break down and crash.
I haven't noticed any of the classic signs for it to crash, like issues when starting up the computer, clicking sounds from the hard drive and what not.
It worked perfectly fine when I turned the computer off, then when I started it up again later on that evening, it wouldn't boot up with a black screen saying "Primary hard disk error, press F1 to resume".
I bought a new hard drive, a sleek and wonderful SSD together with a Win8 64bit OS (I was using an old 32bit Win XP and had misplaced my boot CD and key for it, so I decided it was about time to upgrade the OS as well, and I got the Win 8 really cheap).

After some dabble with the good ol' Murphy's law (the dvd drive was broken (cds work fine though!), so I couldn't boot up from the Win8 dvd, bought a new dvd drive, and it booted up fine, only to have my CPU fan stop working... so I had to buy a new CPU cooler as well) and I was all set to go!


Now to the problem itself.

I would like to see if I can salvage some stuff from my broken hard drive.
When I plug the broken hard drive into the second SATA socket and start up the computer I first get to a black screen with info saying "Secondary master hard disk error press F1 resume", which seems alright seeing that I know that the second disk is broken, then I press F1 and my computer boots up in Win8 as usual.
When I check the disk management (et cetera) the broken disk won't show, and I can't even find any indications that there is something plugged into the SATA 2 at all.
I then decided to see if the disk was recognized in BIOS, and it kind of is, saying there is a "hard drive" plugged in to the SATA 2 socket, but with 0Mb memory, and a blank line after manufacturer info row.

The hard drive doesn't have any noticeable physical damage, nothing rattling around inside, and it spins up fine without any weird clicks and other odd sounds.

Is there anything I can do,
anything I SHOULD do,
anything I have missed,
to manage to salvage at least some things from my old hard drive.
Might there be an issue with that I'm now using Win8 64bit and that my old hard drive was the system disk with Win XP 32bit, that might interfere with recognizing the disk at all.


I'm quite an amateur with computers, with more of a "learn by doing when shit happens"-mentality towards it, so it might be something really easy that I haven't thought of or even knew that I could/should do when stuff like this occurs.

Thanks for help.

 

[Edward Gelernt]

Try checking in the device manager in control panel. See if you can tinker with stuff there to get it to work. If not, I'd recommend just taking it into Best Buy or some other tech place and having them check it out.

 

[enturbulate]

I managed to get the disk to work again.

I put it in the freezer for a day, then when I plugged it in, and turned it around, at a very specific angle it popped up in the disk management and I managed to copy all the stuff I wanted without any further issues.

So I guess this issue is solved.