Ok, heres the deal... My hard drive recently crashed and is not being recognized in bios. When I go to boot it up, it says "Primary Hard Disk not found". Does anyone know of a way to recover the info thats store on the drive. It's pretty important that I get all the info off. I've read that I may be able to image the drive onto several CD's using powerquest drive image pro. The thing I don't understand is how will this work if the drive itself is not recognized? Does anyone have any suggestions that aren't for me to send it to a data recovery center? Thanks in advance. ~Chris

If it is not being recognized by the BIOS during POST, that's not good. Sounds like the controller on the HD is shot. Before giving up, I would try to re-seat the IDE cable at the motherboard and at the HD. If that doesn't work, try hooking up the HD on the Secondary channel as the master device, see if it gets recognized there. If no luck, try a new IDE cable too. Raincheck

I just tried all those methods..No dice... Does anyone have any resources that could help me recover the data myself? I would like this to be a learning experience for myself, rather than sending it out for someone else to do for me and I learn nothing. I guess I could deal with losing the info on there, seeing as how I've got the majority of it backed up on CD's. There were just some recent documents that I needed... Anyway, if anyones got some resources, hook me up! lol Thanks!!

When you boot up the computer, put your hand on the hard drive. Is it spinning up? If not, I have heard of people who have put the hard drive in the freezer for several hours, then hooking it up, and it will spin up long enough to get data off of it. However, I think your problem is the controller (the circuit board on the bottom of the hard drive) has let go. I have also heard that people have gotten the same exact model hard drive and replaced the controller. I have no idea how succesful that would be, as far as I know it's not a normal practice. By the way, you do realize that sending a dead hard drive out to a professional data recovery place is outrageously expensive. I mean BIG bucks. Good Luck Raincheck