Hard Drive Not Recognized

[derek2006]

I restarted my computer because my windows 7 gadgets were not working correctly.

Then it would not boot into windows. The bios load up takes a good 3 minutes and then says, "Primary Hard Disk Errors. Press F1 to continue." I do and then it says, "no CD in drive press ctrl alt delete to restart." If I don't continue and enter setup instead the hard drive does show up as WD3200AAKS on SATA channel 1. I noticed that the SMART status field is blank but my other two drives do show up as SMART enabled, previously there was a SMART ENABLED next to this disk following the name. Now it just says the model of the drive.

I tried using dos and it can't detect the drive. Neither can WD Data Lifeguard.

I plugged it into another computer, the one I'm on now, it's BIOS also takes 3 minutes to initialize. However it cannot identify the model of the drive, but it does list that there is something on SATA channel 3. I cannot get it to show up in windows. I tried plugging it in when it was already running hoping I would get a, "found new hardware" message but there's nothing. The hard drive spins up fine and there are no abnormal sounds. There was absolutely no warning it was going to die.

It's a WD Caviar Blue 320GB and it literally is my primary hard disk with windows and everything! The biggest BS is I have a Lab report + research due Wednesday, a MATLAB programming assignment due this Wednesday (MATLAB being only on that machine), and a writing research final next Monday. All of my work is on this drive. I'm at a loss, the kicker being that I actually do keep a backup on a 16GB Flash drive that went corrupt just YESTERDAY.

What can I do? Sending it somewhere is not an option I need this working TONIGHT because I need the data ASAP. Please help, Thank you.

 

[pjmelect]

I think that you have a dead hard drive, try downloading and running the hard drives manufacturer diagnostic software from their web site. I have known this software to fix some hard drive issues and you will need to run this software if you are going to return the drive under warranty.

 

[derek2006]

I have it being detected now, and even got into windows once, thought it was repaired and so I shut it back down to connect the other 2 hard drives back up.

What I did was removed the PCB and dipped it in isophoric alcohol and cleaned everything I could. Also if it had a warranty it doesn't now. I wouldn't want to deal with getting WD to warranty it anyway when I could buy a better drive for 50 bucks. And if this drive failed me once I sure as hell don't want a replacement model -- one that's most likely refurbished at that.

Now I get windows was unable to start or something to that effect. I just ran startup repair and it was unable to fix it. It's message is:
Root cause found:
Boot sector for the system disk partition is corrupt.
Repair action: Boot sector repair.
Result: Failed. Error code = 0x17

The plus side is that now repair tools will at least be able to see it.

 

[pjmelect]

Don’t try to fix the disk until you back up your data. Repairing a disk causes intensive disk operations that can cause a weak drive to fail. Back up your data immediately. Worry about fixing it later.

Don’t try and boot from it back up the data from your other computer.

 

[derek2006]

I plugged it back into the other computer. Immediately upon bootup the computer initiated scandisk and attempted to repair 2 of the 3 partitions on the drive and it found A LOT of things wrong. However the Partition I want repaired it skipped it's the OS partition containing my documents. This computer keeps saying that it needs to format that partition because its raw. I select cancel but yet it still gives the error "F is not accessible (cyclic redundancy error)" which apparently means a bad spot on the hard drive.

I ran the diagnostic software and it failed in 8 seconds citing "failed read test element". It also said the test should take several hours.

Right now I am in need of some really good recovery software because windows refuses to scan that partition citing the CRC error. I can't get files off of it.