Last week, my second hard drive ceased working and being recognized. I have since purchased one of the exact model and replaced the circuit board - since I know the hard drive was still working as one could hear it spinning. I replaced it and the hard drive is recognized in the device manager. I figured that all that had to be done is to initialize it. Unfortunaly, I get an error saying that it is an incorrect function. The hard drive appears in the boot menu with zeros all across for its capacity and so forth.

Sounds broken.. Put the new board back in the new drive and install it to the system. What else can be done?? "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Well. I know it's not the motherboard since I tested the new hard drive with it's own board and it was picked up immediately with everything in order. I'm beginning to think that this hard drive literally fried itself. No idea how. But I've since tried to simply recover the data (nothing important enough to warrant spending money on) and the recovery programs are all saying 0 Cylinders, 0 Tracks Per Cylinder, 0 Sectors per track...The data is gone for good, huh? Which is weird since I can hear and feel the drive vibrating.

The platters may be spinning but the pickup head is probably shot. Vibrating? Head and platters meet something losses. WinXp Amd 64 3000 Msi Neo2 Platinuim 1 gig ddr 400. When we cast a pebble into a pond we should look past the first ripple.

you could try in another machine, although it sounds dead to me.. i hate computers! but cant help myself....

Suspected as much. Well, the new one is in and is being detected though Windows 7 doesn't seem to want to show it in the Computer menu after being partitioned and formatted. I should note that I had to force it to partition through cmd.

In 7 you have to o into admin tools,open disk management,click on the new disk and assign it a drive letter then it will mount. WinXp Amd 64 3000 Msi Neo2 Platinuim 1 gig ddr 400. When we cast a pebble into a pond we should look past the first ripple.