SATA HDD crashed - data recovery assistance needed pls.

[alexcraw]

I built a system for a musician who needed it for recording in his studio. Spec as follows:

Asus P5k Mobo
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 Stepping (2.4GHz 1066MHz)
Kingston 2GB DDR2 800MHz
Pioneer DVR-115DBK 20x DVD±RW
Innovision 3D Geforce 7200GS 128MB PCI-E Graphics Card
Maxtor 80GB IDE HDD (boot disk)
***Seagate ST3500320AS 500GB Hard Drive SATA II 7200rpm *32MB Cache* (storage only)***
XP Pro

He recorded a session with a band and near the end, he said that the SATA drive failed, reporting a cache failure.

The PC still boots but takes about 5 mins to do so. Now the second drive does not show in My Computer or the Disk Management section, but appears in Device Manager and BIOS.

I ran a CMD prompt window and tried to mount the drive :d, but it failed to mount. I tried to put it in an external caddy and plug and play, but no joy there either.

I can't see whether the data is still there or not. How is it possible to attempt to recover those files?

Thanks

Alex

[pam123]

That sounds important enough for you to call up these guys : http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/hard-drive-recovery/

[glc]

Before paying a data recovery service, download the trial of Ontrack Easy Recovery and see what it says it can recover.

[Gregson]

It seems that your hard drive has suffered a physical failure as it is not shown in the disk management. If your data is really very important then you can go for the data recovery service company. Data recovery service is costly affair, and it helps to recover data from dead and unrecognized hard drive in the BIOS. There are lot of data recovery (http://www.stellarinfo.com) service company you can look on the google to fine the best.