Apparently, these things can go belly-up with no special signs that they intend to do so. Just a screen freze, restart, and missing boot drive.

Now, at first, I thought this was a normal boot error or something. But it quickly became clear that it was much more serious when windows recovery tools found no driver and nothing to repair.

My essential files were all backed up, so thanks Poseidon for that. Obviously, the "non essential" files were in the hundreds of gigs, so that's a lot of catching up to do.

I've bough and set up my new drive, so I can browse the internet again and actually do stuff with my rig. Next time, I might just make a RAID and SSD config. It beats the hell of loosing everything in one go.

Now I've got a question: has anyone ever managed to recover stuff from your broken HDD's and what was the problem with it. I'm gonna send it to a firm that specialises with data recovery, but if they try to make a fortune off of me, I'm gonna tell them to can the drive.

I had also noticed something wrong when mine went bust: Some files had the file size 0 bytes. Unfortunately, I had synced that into my backup. Since this time, I always check for this during before backup. I didn't manage to recover that and lost some music and documents.

A few years earlier, when I installed Linux for the first time for dual boot, I misunderstood a button as a help link and wiped out the partition table. Succeeded in restoring it.

Very scary thing to happen.

I try to backup everything important on DVDR, External HD and for smaller files Cloud.

Games over 5Gb, i dont backup and just hope that i play them before my HD crashes.

Looking at other forum threads of people having problems with their hard drives, I was feeling sceptical if sending it to a specialist is even worth it. I might be looking at a few hundred euros at the minimum. But there is a company close to where I live and their diagnostic costs only €30, so the least I can do is get a good idea what went wrong. I don't intend to put it through the works myself, and they might find out it's only something minor. I might pay somewhere around €200 for some pictures I didn't back up, and the old saves might be great to have, but more than that and it's gone for good.

Have you tested your HDD with this ?
http://www.hdsentinel.com

I know it's obvious but is your disc spinning? Have you checked data & power cables? My HDD also had similar symptoms (freeze and no boot drive after restart) and swichting cables solved it.

I tried every basic step to check it wasn't something obvious, like a disconnected cable or a bad MBR sector. But no, after checking everything, the disc is refusing to even acknowledge itself. I don't know if it's spinning or not, but it was pretty quiet, so probably not.

The new drive was put in it's place, so obviously nothing wrong with the cables or the motherboard.

Depends if it's a surface problem or an electronic one, I managed to recover the data of several disks in my previous job by simply swapping the controller board... but of course it only works if you have another disk of the exact same model and the problem is of course caused by the controller.

If the disk is only "half-dead" as in, it starts but is extremely slow, makes lots of noise, etc..., then the best thing is to use an external USB-to-SATA adapter and connect the disk once Windows has started. Also it might be worth to boot to a Linux based live CD and try to copy your data from there as Windows doesn't like at all damaged disks while Linux is usually more "tolerant".

But of course if it's a surface issue (i.e. the disk surface is damages) or an heads issues then there is very little you can do without the proper equipment.

I have a nephew that suffers from it, really sad. It's like he can't concentrate and it totally screws up his ability to do any school work.

Oh wait that says "HDD". Sorry.

I think it might actually be something like a controller board failure. If it was something mechanical, it would probably still detect the disc. My BIOS says there's nothing there at all.

So you have opened 2 identical discs and swaped electronic? Does it require some special tools? Do you have to solder sth or it's like putting as connector?

The controller is "outside", at the bottom of the disk (that's where the SATA or IDE connector is located), usually you only need a small torque screwdriver, remove 5 or 6 screws and you can easily remove the controller.

Most of the time, at least for the disks I worked with, the connector between the controller and the rest of the disk is a "pressure" one so you don't have anything to "unplug", you just have to be careful when putting the new controller to be correctly aligned and to not bend the small connector's pins.

Ok, thx..Will check it out.