.....and now it's my hard drive.

[Jonny]

Right ho, after cleaning and reassembling PC, due to overheating (I think), the hard drive does not want to do anything at all. If I plug it in, it just makes a quiet beeping sound (one beep), starts to spin, but only for about 0.1seconds (enough to make a tiny bit of noise), and not much else.
Its an old 80Gb Maxtor.
Tried it w and w/out IDE cable, and also tested another hard drive, which worked. Has it died?
Please don't tell me it has.....

[unrealuniverse]

check by putting it into another computer. if it doesn't work then i think it might be dead

[Dougal]

90% chance of death.

If you REALLY need the data specialist companies could get the data off it for a fee.

SOunds like the motor is getting caught somewhere.

[Jonny]

Yeah it's dead.

[Dougal]

Bad luck man, u get ur data off it in time?

[Jonny]

Nope, it was a storage drive with 5000 photos (many of which I can't replace) and about 15,000 MP3s (all my music). As well as my games and some documents. I have back ups of important files, but the music and photos...... GRRRRR!!!!
Very unhappy. (Though it's my own fault for not backing up).

[DeludedGuy]

Try Norton Ghost, I hear its great for recovering files from hard drives.

[Jonny]

The hard drive won't even start turning when you plug it in to the power. So I don't think I can recover the files. Can I?

[Lee H]

I had a very similar issue with an 80 Gb Maxtor drive and the problem was down to 2 of the IDE "pins" on the drive becoming loose and falling into the panel - thus not connecting to the IDE cable.

I would check the drive to check if this is the case here

[Jonny]

Thanks for the idea, but all IDE pins, jumper pins and Molex pins are present and correct.
This is so gutting!