Hard drive failure, Please help me guys.

You main system HD has puked. The warning "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER" means that BIOS is looking for an OS but can't read the disk. Most likely it's toast - possibly still readable after you replace it and install a new OS. But check: 1. Power and data cables to drive 2. Power supply 3. BIOS battery could be dead - go into BIOS and check the boot order to make sure the C: drive is still listed. Replace the BIOS battery while there (usually a CR2032 button) Pop in a new drive to replace it, move the old drive to another drive port, run your OS DVD to reinstall on the new drive - then see if you can find/read the old drive to recover any data. Could be just the OS partition died, and the rest of the drive could still be readable. Good luck Jedi

1-3...I checked and they are all good I do Not see the drive listed in my bios...I see the other 2 hd's I have but not the one with the OS? Second part of your explanation im not following.. sorry Are you saying to install a NEW hard drive and do a fresh Windows install then put the old drive back in to see if i can find/read the old drive? Would this be any different than trying to do that with Ubuntu?

If all the cables are good etc, then it sounds like the I/O part of the HD (the electronics) died. Which may or may not mean the physical data platters are "lost". Did you try moving the HD to a DIFFERENT connection to your computer MB? Could also be your MB I/O. More likely though is your HD died and you need to get another and reload your OS.

That happened to me on Vista 2 years ago, and believe it or not, the HD was fine. It was the MBR that was corrupted, but the OS was toast. What had happened in my situation was that the partition table got corrupted by setting up dual boots with various linux distros and one day Grub (linux boot manager) finally decided to kick Window$ ass! I was able to retrieve any data I wanted and reinstall the OS, which was minimal anyway since my C drive is OS and apps only. That same HD is still in use, and that computer is my back-up DAW and general use box, running fine. I still dual boot with whatever linux flavor of the day I like, but never, ever on my DAW again!

1) Install the drive as a secondary drive and chkdsk it. That can sometimes work. Also I have had drives that reach a failure point which seems to be temperature related. Give the drive a day and then try 1. It may give you enough time to salvage.

me neither, cerendir. I seem to have had a lot of `friends` with dead or dying hard drives coming to me for help recently, so I am getting quicker at killing or curing, but not necessarily BETTER. *SIGH*

Don't screw around with it. Take it to a data recovery place. Everyone else, today is a good day to do some backups.

Methinks you're screwed :/ I hope not, but i feel your pain either way.

. There is another thing you could try if you are comfortable with electronics and you also have an IDENTICAL working hard drive. Remove the circuit board from the IDENTICAL working hard drive (same model, same circuit board number marked on the PCB). You will need the appropriate sized torx screwdriver. Replace the board on the non-working drive with the one from the working drive , then re-connect to the computer (as a NON-BOOT drive) and see if you can read anything. I have actually used this technique to fix a dead IBM drive some 5-6 years ago (I always buy drives in pairs so having an identical good one was not a problem). I tried it again some time later on two different (but still identical) drives and it did not work (failure was probably not the board, but maybe the preamp chip in the drive arm or one or more of the MR heads). I have about 30 to 40 drives in my studio (mostly in mirrored pairs), and I have seen a number of drive failures over the years, but none in the last 5 years (knock on wood). This is why my boot drives are all mirrored pairs (RAID 1) and my main data storage drive is an eSATA RAID 5 array with automatic re-build. The RAID5 array is further backed-up onto a RAID1 Mirror once a month or so and that mirror is taken to the local bank vault. This kind of thing is what is needed if you are serious about data protection. Don't assume "THE CLOUD" will protect your data either as millions of people's data have already been lost and/or destroyed and/or publicly distributed without permission in "The Cloud". .

Still no luck. Seagate Barracuda ST3500413AS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive