Desktop

Hitting it was a bad idea. You could have caused some very serious damage to the data under the heads if they hit the disk. By replacing the connector do you mean that you swapped controllers with another 20GB IDE drive?? If that is so then your warranty is void. Ideally you should have used a controller from the same type of drive since they may be different if you look at them closely and note the numbers on the visible chips. If your computer does not detect it at all you may have real problems. You can try cooling down the old controller since it may have just an overheating problem. I put a drive in a ziplock bag and froze for a little while to give the chips a chance to cool. Then I hooked it up as a slave and copied all the data to a master drive before it overheated again. If this is not possible I suggest you call Drive savers and be prepared to spend some serious $$ It is the only safe way. They are pros and do this all the time. just put the drive back to the way it was before you started swapping controllers. They have an 800 number. Good Luck

See the TR article 200 ways to revive a hard dirve,see the following thread
http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6255_11-5029626.html
?tag=search
I f you have any problems,use the window in upper right corner and type in 200 Ways to Revive a Hard Drive,click on Go

First, in a multi drive system, you often need to change the jumpers on the hard drive when you disable 1 drive.

If the 40GB drive was not set up as your boot drive, you will need to set things up so that the 20GB drive is able to run again.

If you still cannot access the drive, try some of the hints in the TR download on ways to revive a dead hard drive.

The download is missing from every link I tried.

You can browse through the article here:

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6255-5029761.html

If the data on the drive is valuable or irreplaceable, I agree with answer 1 that you should send the drive to a recovery service.
The more you attempt to do, the harder (and more costly) it will be to have the data recovered.

Chas

the TechRepublic article 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive is really one one way. put it in a sealable plastic bag, stick it in the freeze for a day or so, take it out and hook it up copying as much info to a new drive as possible until it dies again. repeat process to get all data or until freezing it doesn't work anymore. then toss it.

the freeze part works like a champ.

Thanks everyone for putting their effort to help me with the terrible disaster.

Actaully have a copy of the 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive but it's not working. I have tried everything except for the freezing part. I'll give that a try to to see if it'll work. If not then I guess I'm out of luck since I can't really afford to take it to a data recovery place.

Thanks again for trying! I will submit my ratings soon.

This question was closed by the author