Dead Hard Drive

[Granty]

First the camera (few years ago mind), now the laptop
hard drive.

It looks like my hard drive has given up on me, I was working on my laptop yesterday when the good old BSOD popped up, giving it the "beginning
physical memory dump".

Now all I get is..

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer
/>
..

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF82C4528, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

I've tried chkdsk/fixboot
but they throw the following respectively:

The Specified drive is not valid, or there is no disk in the drive.

The target partition
is The file system on the startup partition is unknown.
FIXBOOT is attempting to detect the file system type.

FIXBOOOT cannot open the partition.

/>
If I try a fresh install of Windows, the partitions show up as:

-: Partition1 [Unknown] 19069 MB (19069 MB free)
Unpartitioned space 8 MB

If I try sticking it on the unknown partition, it throws:

An error occured while Setup was updating partition informaton on:

19078 MB
Disk 0 at Id on bus 0 on atapi [MBR].

Setup cannot continue. To quit setup, press F3.

Is it stuffed?

[chavalier]

have you tried reseating it?

[Granty]

have you tried reseating it?

Yes.  It gets as far as the Windows loading bar screen before detecting
the problem.

[chavalier]

I have a caddy if you want to try it as an external drive, as long as its
on sata.

[Chris H]

If it's data you're after then a penguin livecd
may help.

[Matt]

You can pick up a USB to IDe/Laptop IDE (Dunno what its
called) - would be worth buying for something liek a tenner (novatech/misco do them) and getting the HD out to get data off, but if your ready to format it - do you have
anything too loose?

With HDDs I never trust them once Im certain its them playing up - they tend to be broken, and stay broken - even if they play ball for a
while.

[chavalier]

/>I have a caddy if you want to try it as an external drive, as long as its on sata.

I meant as long as it's not SATA

[Granty]

but if your ready to format it - do you have anything too loose?

I do, I'm not ready to format.

It's IDE, would it
pick it up as an external?

[Shirker]

Run SpinRite on it (grc.com) - works miracles
with dead hard drives and gets them back to life in a lot of cases. If you don't want to buy it let me know and I'll send a copy. The chap who runs it is happy for
people to do that as long as if it works they then go and buy a copy, which is far far cheaper than a new HDD.

[Matt]

but if your ready to format it - do you have anything too loose?

I do, I'm not ready to format.

It's IDE, would it pick it up as an external?

YEah jsut like a USB HDD etc