The post above about the read/write head arm sticking is a good one - this is pretty common.
In these situations I would look for a working identical drive. Swap the controller PCB and often you get success. I’m in a rush now so can’t post about bad block sections etc - some more recent drives store this in NVRAM on the controller PCB. Obviously when you swap controllers this information is incorrect.
And boot from a different disk! Don’t mess up what’s left on this one.
t.
Mozy is really good AND cheap so you don’t ever have to worry about this problem. I use it and it is scheduled to run in the middle of the night which runs very quickly. However, the first backup can literally take days even with a fast connection. That isn’t much of a problem because you can still use your computer for everything while it is working but you can’t turn your computer off in the meantime.
Yeah, I’ve got 1 day, 15 hours to go. Looks like a perfect solution for me.
Number, the site asked me for the id of the person who referred me. Did I do you out of a reward? I might still be able to change it.
I second ZipperJJ’s suggestion of TestDisk. This has recovered data for me on numerous occassions.
Usually, you can recover the data yourself with freeware tools if the disk spins, but if you are going to attempt recovery yourself, you have to accept the risk that you could lose the data for good. The reason the data recovery firms charge so much is because they take no risks. They have expensive duplicating machinery that makes exact copies of the disk to work on, leaving the original untouched.
If you do choose to attempt it yourself, I recommend you use a boot CD like the System Rescue CD - http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page. This includes a recent version of TeskDisk. The link will allow you to download a .ISO file that you can burn to a CD (from another working computer, obviously). You can then use this to boot the computer containing the dodgy HD, and run the tools from there.
My Mozy username is the email address in my SDMB profile.
Thanks for thinking of it, but if it doesn’t work, don’t worry about it.