urgent help needed before I cry! (HDD related)

[mmace]

hi guys, I've just opened up my PC to put in a new 250Gb HDD, because of space limitations I had to move my other HDD's around, when I booted up, my old 160Gb was working fine, I went to play a video that was on there and it froze after not long, then got a message bubble at the bottom saying there was an error reading to that HDD

I switched off the PC and looked inside to see that the IDE cable had come apart, I put it back together and tried booting up but it said there was no system disk (this isn't the C: drive), I moved the drive to my PCI IDE card and during the boot it shows what's connected but for this drive it shows about 8 small smiley faces and says it's 8mb but then doesn't go any further

have tried it in all 8 of my IDE places (4 on motherboard 4 on PCI card) and tried 4 different IDE cables, tried it as master & slave etc etc

does anyone have any idea's what to do?

this disk if full of High Definition movies that's taken days to download, but more importantly it has loads of old home movies (not those sort!) that I'd just finished editing and getting ready for DVD (took a couple of weeks to edit 9 VHS tapes) for the rest of the family


the drive is a Samsung SP1614N

any help or advise would be very much appreciated

[MasterMind]

You have done almost everything mate. Only 1 suggestion: Try this HDD in some other machine as Slave unit. I suspect of disk developing few BAD sectors... :(

[purecat]

there are programs out there you can use to try and repair/recover your hd...i went thru almost the same thing recently....dont give up on it yet, its not a total loss....google google google :D

[mmace]

I put it in 2 other PC's and the BIOS didn't even see it

took it into work and we opened up a Maxtor external HDD, swapped the drives and the PC found it so I backed it all up

cheers for the help guys

[MasterMind]

Wow! Cool. Thanks for posting back mate. Good you got your data back... :)