Is HDD really dead?

[viktor]

First post from a new newbie
winxp pro; 3 HDD and 1 DVD-RW
40 gb primary master (system);
40 gb primary slave
80 gb secondary master
DVD-RW secondary slave

all working okay 'til last night. everything froze up as i was on internet/downloading a movie. i waited 15 minutes or so . . . one of the HDD was causing the LED to stay on constantly. ctrl-alt-del wouldn't bring up task manager, so i just hit the reboot button.

seems like that wasn't a good thing to do. after reboot, no D: drive (that's the 40 gb primary slave.

i rebooted and looked at bios description of IDE drives. There is no sign of that D: drive. Nothing in the disk manager part of administrator tools either. Should i toss it? Is there any possibility of software issue that would stop bios from finding it? it's completely full of stuff i'd kind of like to retrieve if possible.
thanks, in advance,
viktor

[matm347]

Re: Is HDD really dead?

Try the drive on a different CPU, if this isn't an option, try a different IDE port, power cable(swap with one you know works) and IDE cable.

I doubt a software issue would come up after you've been using the drive...but I have seen cables/controllers go bad during normal use.

Your descriptions would first make me verify that the drive is spinning first, then checking the other things I mentioned.