80gb Drive Dead?

I'm sure there are plenty of threads that say exactly what I'm going to say.

Last night while watching videos from my third internal hard drive the video just stopped. I turned the computer off only to see that it said, "SATA Drive 0 not found, Press f1...."

They are all three SATA drives. The main drive which holds the OS has been pretty much running since Feb.2005 with a couple of weekend downtime and one or two formats.

I've tried everything from resetting the BIOS to the factory settings, disabling the other two SATA drives that only the boot is "ON", and even reinstalling a fresh copy of XP onto the drive but it won't even let me do that because it says there is no drive.

All cables are plugged in, and as far as I know everything in the BIOS is set up the correct way.

One thing I did notice is that when I took the drive out and gently moved it or rotated it that the drive arm was moving when I gently moved the drive around. It was a similar sound to a 160gb external WD drive I bought two years ago that died last year.

Any suggestions....help...comments about my drive?

'80gb Drive Dead?'


RIP

Seriously?

When you can hear the arm moving without the drive plugged in/ turned on, that means it pretty much dead?

http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache...ve reading arm loose&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca