[hitchingsm]

I have this Dell Optiplex 240 that has been running fine for years, one evening when I was being shut it down it hung, I held the power button in and it shut down.
The next morning the computer would not boot, I can get to the BIOS, there is no IDE drive seen at all not even the CDrom.
I take the hardrive and make it a slave to another Dell, both are cable select so I left the jumpers alone, booted the PC, I can only boot to the BIOS, no drives seen on primary IDE, I do see the CDrom. I set the jumpers, still same result, I dig in a box and find non cable select cables, set a known good hardrive (works when I disconnect the crashed one) as master and the crashed drive as slave, neither drive is seen. I even tried it in a 3rd machine, my primary computer and same result. I have had hardrives fail in the past, but I have always been able to hook the drive up as a slave and retrieve the information.
any idea if the drive is recoverable, I did order IDE to USB connector and was going to have the PC running when I plugged the USB in. any ideas? I forgot I tried to boot to the W2K cd and go to recovery console, can't open recovery console, No hard drive found.
Thanks, Maria

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i think your best bet is to see if that IDE to USB will let you get into the drive...but if there's been a catastrophic failure in the controller on the drive (which is what it sounds like might have happened)...then there might not be much that can be done....if this data is REALLY important and price is not an option...there are companies that can take the drive apart and get the data off in some really funky ways (electron microscopes and what nots)

[dsenette]

i think your best bet is to see if that IDE to USB will let you get into the drive...but if there's been a catastrophic failure in the controller on the drive (which is what it sounds like might have happened)...then there might not be much that can be done....if this data is REALLY important and price is not an option...there are companies that can take the drive apart and get the data off in some really funky ways (electron microscopes and what nots)

[hitchingsm]

That is what I thought.
The data is important, I work for a public library and this was our admin PC, her last backup was a few months ago. but there is not much money.
I will just wait for the IDE to USB cable

[dsenette]

her last backup was a few months ago

that'll get you every time