HELP!!! My kids were playing on my pc. I came back to find a black screen with no reponse. I reset the pc now my primary hdd will not load up and does not appear in the BIOS. I spoke to seagate they told me to try their seatools application which doesnt detect it. The drive spins up and there are no unusal noises coming from it. I've done all the tests (cable swapping, another pc etc but to no avail) I was hunting around on the net and found some hdd firmware repair. the link is this http://www.hdd-tools.com/products/rrs/ does anyone know if this software works as it sounds like a scam to me. you have to download the software (which is free) diagnose and then pay a licence fee to fix. Any solutions other than sending it off to a data recovery specialist which would allow me to at least acces the drive to recover the data would be very much appreciated finally if its a broken MBR would that prevent the bios form recignising the hdd? thank you

The BIOS is O/S independent, therefore did you have S.M.A.R.T turned on in BIOS prior to this failure? Have you put the hard drive in another PC ?

S.M.A.R.T is turned off. The pc boots fine off an old hdd i had lying around. I've done all the checks and come to the conlusion its a problem with the drive rather the a mobo IDE controller issue. I bought a sata drive as a replacement and that works fine but i still want to get acces to the old drive to get my old files off it

By reset do you mean restarted? Is this an IDE drive? Life's more painless for the brainless.

reset - yes by a turning the power on and off. It is an IDE drive and as mentioned in my post above the ide contoller on the motherboard is working fine (tested using an old ide drive on both ide channels) so its not a motherboard problem. any thoughts?

Since you had S.M.A.R.T. turned off there was no way for it to let you know when a failure was starting and give you time to do something. If the drive spins and does not detect that usually means the controller board on the bottom is bad electronically. With this type of failure the only choice is to replace the drive, you already indicate a good drive works so the rest of the system should be ok. If data is needed from the drive you need to take is somewhere for data recovery. Many of the drives I see are failed controllers and if we get a matching card from another identical drive some of the data possibly gets recovered. Richard

my thanks for all the responses