SMART Fail Warning, now I can't see drive in Windows, trying to save files off drive?

[unpaint]

Last night I noticed a locally stored video was weirdly buffering, thought nothing of it. Today I wake up and the PC was stuck at the POST screen saying something along the lines of SMART fail detected on drive ST3000....(I recognized this as my seagate 3tb drive, which is purely a data backup drive).

I tried rebooting but WIndows would freeze at on the black screen with the windows logo. Same thing happened when I tried safe mode. Eventually I pulled the hard drive out and now Windows boots fine, everything runs normally.

However I'd like to try to get the files off the drive. I put the drive into another PC and Windows booted up okay on that PC. Then in the lower right of the Windows taskbar I got the Windows notification that new drivers were being installed for my hardware/disk drive. However that installation failed. I am not able to see the drive at all in Windows. What can I try in order to access the files long enough to try to back them up?

The drive had been working perfectly before last night. Today is the first time I got the SMART warning and now suddenly the drive doesn't work at all -- I thought it was supposed to be an early warning?

Also of note is the drive now makes some abnormal whirring noises when I try rebooting.

 

[tomatthe]

Try reading through this guide,

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-1644496/lost-data-recovery.html

 

[unpaint]

Thanks for the reply, I read through that but it all relies on scanning the drive in windows. However I can't see the drive at all? Anything I can try in order to see the drive?

 

[tomatthe]

Try hunting through some of the other post on here that are very similar to yours. If you had a linux live cd you could try booting to that and see if it was able to read the drive.

If you can't get the drive detected at all it's likely you would need to pay someone to recover any data on it which would be expensive.