Drive disappeared

[Trooper4985]

I come home and fire up my computer and notice something doesn't look right when I browse though My Computer to explore a CD full of pictures from the weekend. I eventually realize that one of my HD's is missing. I turn everything off, open the case up and make sure the cables are tight and turn it back on. Still nothing. This time I get <G:> as an unformated unnamed volume. I open it back up recheck the cable at the mobo end and fire it back up... no the drive has disappeared completely in windows but if I boot with the windows disk and look at the drives I can install windows on... the drive is there but unformatted. Does this mean my drive died on me with no warning? It's a 5 year old Seagate that I use for storing junk... Nothing real important on there just kinda sucks to lose some of the car and bike videos that are on there.

I'm not paying for some data recovery service as this is nothing important... just wondering if anyone has any ideas on how to possibly recover some or all of the data. IIRC the drive was FAT32 and is slave on IDE2.

Thanks

 

[davidlem]

Without spending money to can get trial software like Easy Recovery and GetDataBack to see if it's worth spending a hundred bucks on...or I'm sure you could trip over it elsewhere on the 'Net.