hard drive death

[90.]

If the data is really important there are things you can do to recover the data.
you have not said what interface is on the drive, most likely either IDE or SATA, SATA being the newest and most prone to problems 1 & 2
IDE is the older interface and will be prone to problem 3)

1) drive seen in bios but not by windows or OS-X no noise from drive - when the drive is powered up does the platter inside spin? try tilting the drive you should feel a gyroscopic effect.
2) Drive makes no noise & is not seen by pc.
3) Drive not seen by PC & the drive makes a... wirr..click..wirr...click then it's dead.... that will be the drive motor or the spindle bearings inside the drive housing failed or failing, open the drive housing to investigate and it will irreparably damage the platters.!

IF the fault is 1 or 2 it is normally the drive interface that has gone south, this can be overcome as can the motor not spinning up due to motor drive control failure.

The drive controller pcb from the hard drive can be replaced & is normally held on with small torx screws, replace it with a working board from Exactly the same model hard drive, It must be same drive P/N and preferably the same date code, this info is on the drive label.
buy a working drive from ebay and swap controller .. it will most likely not boot but should allow the data to be read from the drive if attached as a slave.

I've used this method a number of times over the years to recover data.

Regards
90.

[Cougar]

I would recommend a NAS to avoid future problems, can be configured for raid and to automatically backup from all the devices which attach to your home network rather than being attached directly to one pc at a time. Also gives you the option to securely access your files remotely from anywhere and any device with internet access.

[munchh]

i wish i knew what the hell is going on, i just tried backing up my phone and tablet and my pc has killed both sd cards!

not having much luck here?

[Hamradioop]

1. run a online virus scan.

[xplosiv1]

have you thought of using a solid state harddrive ...... no moving parts very high reliability. they're also quite reasonably priced these days.

I changed out my laptop there a few months ago, the difference is phenomenal. I use the SSD for running my operating system and also for important data back up. I have another 1TB SATA drive for general file storage and programs I dont run very often.

I also back up my entire system on an external solid state drive once a month. I've had too many laptops die on me over the years.