There was a power spike a few days ago and my power supply didnt like it much, I replaced the mainboard, psu and now my hd is gone :( I cant get into anything at all. It finds it in the bios but then it hangs with a primary HDD controller failure - happens on like 3 different computers so its the board on the HD. Its a 18042.7 MB WDexpert 418000. Does anyone know where i can get a new controller board for it???? the data is very important! sad sad days :(

Have you tried slaving this drive on another computer? Try checking you CMOS settings to see if the spike didn't affect them.

First off get the exact same model hard drive from the manufacturer, in this case I believe its Western Digital, then swap out the controller cards. That usually seems to work. If that fails you can try swapping out the circuitry that controls the read/write heads within the hard drive(you will void warranties, but who cares. I recently had the same exact problem with a 40 gig drive from a recent Dell system that crashed for a friend of mine. The computer would give me the same error "HDD Controller Failure" crap with the complimentary "Click of Death". Not having the convenience of an extra hard drive controller, I went through a routine of banging the hard drive and booting up the computer until I received an "Imminent Hard Drive Failure" error. NO JOKE. At this point I was able to see the files on the system, however if the system was left on for more than a few minutes, I would start getting error reading disk messages while traversing the directories. So what I did was: 1)piggy-back the hard drive in another computer 2) Boot with a Windows 98 boot disk that had the xcopy command on it(never try data recover within WINDOWS, you'll end up making things worse, doing it from a dos prompt allows you to change to a directory without doing a directory listing, which spares the computer from crashing due to a corrupted file) 3) Immediately copied the directories I needed using xcopy /e /s command to the other hard drive in the computer. With that I was able to get all important files back. If none of the above helps, you can always get an electron microscope for a million bucks or so and spend a few thousand years piecing together the data bit by bit.