Recover drive seen in BIOS but not in OS

[xomm]

I have a 1TB Seagate Barracuda drive that can be seen in BIOS (reports SMART status bad), but it cannot be viewed reliably in the OS (sometimes it will not show up in device manager/disk management/etc., other times it does, but only briefly before it dies again).

The disk has power and is spinning.

Any way steps I can try in order to get the data off of this without sending it off to a third party?

As a tangent, is it possible to view the SMART data of the drive without booting to an OS?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there, xomm.

Well you might be able to see that via your BIOS/UEFI, but not all versions have this option. Regardless of what you'll see it really sounds like the drive is in a pretty tough situation. Basically what you could try is connecting it to a different computer (which could help with seeing its SMART data) and try to access it, to see if the same thing happens.
For data recovery you could try accessing it via Ubuntu Live USB/DVD, in hopes that this OS would be able to recognize the drive and access its partitions. Another option would be data recovery software: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filerecovery/tp/free-file-recovery-programs.htm.

However, if your data is really important to you and if the drive is physically damaged, I guess it would be better to go straight for a data recovery company, even if you'd like to avoid that. It's just the most reliable option.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD