Is my HDD dead?

[dappamikey]

Excuse my lack of expertise.

During the last week my PC started freezing up occasionally though it always started responding after a few mins or if I ctrl+alt+ del. However on Thursday (while playing on LVP) it just totally froze up and wouldn't respond at all. Naturally I tried to restart it but it wouldn't go past the windows vista loading screen despite several attempts.

I then tried to reinstall Vista and the first time it went through the setup everything seemed ok, but I was really tired so I let it install overnight. When I woke up I was[/] greeted by the windows memory diagnostic screen which showed numerous attempts at fixing errors but itself had frozen there without response.

Naturally, I tried to reinstall Vista again but this time when I got to the screen where you choose which drive to install it on there were no drives at all, this was also the case when trying the recovery options.

All this would suggest to my inferior knowlege that it's dead but my last hope is in BIOS which seems to recognise the HD and it's brand but upon attempting to boot from it It would not go past the flashing cursor black screen. In BIOS IDE config screen (see pic2 below) it recognise hard drive master but I assume it should also recognise the Slave as such??? Is it possible it's a loose connection???

I've attached a few pics to hopefully help ( from my mobile).

The first is when I tried to run Windows Memory Diagnostic from Vista installation, the third an error box when trying Startup recovery and the second is a pic from BIOS explaining my only hope of redemption above.

[xBlueXFoxx]

Windows Vista and Windows Se7en if I'm correct need to have the original driver CD that would come with your motherboard, to install properly. Not sure this only shows of when you try booting via~ BIOS. If you can possibly get it to boot into Safe Mode or Windows service repair mode. You can try to install Vista from there, and it will not require the driver disk, or attempt to repair your system with a system restore.

[dappamikey]

None of the pics are from booting via BIOS, only through vista installation CD and I can't use any of the recovery tools that way.

Some tech guys just suggested slaving my HD to another Master so I will try that and see what happens.

[dappamikey]

And it's worked perfectly . I'll never know if reinstallation was necessary but no files lost, no harm done.

[Nanook]

All these threads about HDDs failing has convinced me to start backing up my stuff again.

[striker]

Haven't someone got this problem before too ?