HDD not recognised anymore!!!! HELP ME

[DARKLORD58]

Hi,
I got a big problem:
About two weeks ago I plugged my formerly external HDD into my PC to get faster connection and to use it as a normal drive.
It worked just fine, until 2 days ago it suddenly wasn't recognised by WinXP anymore. When I try to access it (it's still shown, but not under it's designated name) Win tells me that it's not formatted and asks if I want to do this now.
Well, I ran several anti-virus programs, deleted all spy- and adware, run the manufaturers diagnostic tool (it found some damaged sectors, which could be repaired) which didn't help one bit. It's a WDC HDD 160GB and, of course, warranty expired about two months ago!!! So please help me, any serious suggestion will do. I need the data on it, especially the 10 GB of personal photos of which I don't have a back-up.
So any suggestions how to get the files? If I can save the drive, that would be nice, but the files are more important!!!
Thanks everyone,

darklord58

 

[N3051M]

have you tried to put it back into the external case?

maybe if its not past that point, but you may be able to use a recovery software to get those photos back..

its painfull i know.. loosing part of your history.. been there..

 

[DARKLORD58]

Thanks for the tipp, I'm trying, apparently the MBR is corrupted, might be able to fix it after all

 

[iss]

I have had two WD hard drives go bad. in both cases the first sign of impending doom was just as you described. MBR corrupted. the first time I fixed the MBR and continued to use the drive. a couple of weeks later the same thing happened and I again repaired the MBR and went out and bought a new hard drive. Since I was in the middle of a project that had taken me a couple of days to put together I waited to finsih it before installing the new hard drive. ( big mistake) on the fourth day I finished my project and went to eat dinner. came back to access the drive and burn it all to disks and suddenly heard, Clickty click, clickty, click, clickty click and the hard drive was toast and a weeks worth of work gone.

My adivice is retrieve your data and get a new hard drive. if the MBR fix doesnt work try retrieving the data with BartPE.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/