NOOOO!!!!

Trying it with Knoppix or a Ubuntu LiveCD will be a good idea.

The first thing I would do is opening the enclosure and getting the disk out of there. Look for the manufacturer of the disk and get the diagnostic software from the manufacturer of the drive (every harddrive manufacturer has this software). Follow the instructions and you might be able to salvage the data on the disk.
If the software brings the disk back to life, the first thing to do is that you create a backup of the data. After that throw the disk away, it is not worth using it anymore since it has allready failed once.

You could allso download the UBCD or Ultimate Boot CD, it has all the diagnostic software you need for testing harddrives.

Thanks for all the help, turns out the disk had died.

There was no way to retrieve the data, shame.

Still a new drive under warranty and at least 2 backup systems will be in place from now on

Didn't you have all the photos stored on the PC itself or do you remove them from time to time?

For various reasons all the older stuff is backed up on optical dics, but no longer kept on a main drive.

I was preparing a spare drive in the system to use when this happened.

On the bright side I have everything up to 2 months ago on CDs, somewhere. I just need to locate most of them now.

Firstly I sympathise with your plight I had something similar happen a couple of years ago,

So I do not want to sound smug and I know it is slamming the door after the horse has bolted, but a Flickr Pro account is about £20 a year you have unlimited storage, (You can restrict who sees your pictures if you wish) and you can access them from any PC in the world. I always send all my pictures to there as well as keeping them on my External HDD the chances of Flickr's server and my HDD going down at the same time are I think negligible.

I've never had to do this, but I did see it mentioned on the web, that if the electrics are dead, as long as you have another identical drive you can swap the electrics over and gain access to the platters. I'm sure that's what a lot of the recovery firms do.

I've just bought a drive from a computer fair that was supposed to be new but, I became suspicious when the SMART readings indicated some use, so just out of curiosity I tried some recovery software and recovered the My Documents folder!!! some nice photographs in there I then wrote all 000s to the drive, but I don't really want to use it... it might have been returned as faulty. Pissed off though because that's the 2nd NEW drive I've bought from a computer show that wasn't NEW the other one was a WD and had Recertified printed on the label and if you look at WD's site they do list Recertified drives. I'll have to go to dealer to make sure that I do get a NEW drive.

shim

You buy drives cheaply from online dealers such as Scan and Ebuyer that really are new!

Re Flickr as backup: I can't upload all my RAW files!

Just realised my Flickr is a Pro account.

Uploading all my max quality JPEGs as we speak!

I wouldn't trust the carriers with HD's. I live very close to a a fairly busy retail/mail order camera shop and have seen the carrier van driver wheel a trolly full of bags out of the shop and just throw them 4-5m straight into the back of his van, some falling to the floor. I usually go into Manchester to Micro Direct for HD's. I've been to Scan but wasn't all that impressed with their shop service.

I have dealt with a firm called w-w-w.span.com for Panasonic SW-9576-C Cartridge loading DVD-RAM drives which I use for drag drop backups. I had no choice over that.. no one else sells them and they get away with charging over a £100 drive and I've bought four Safest method of backing up though, never had a problem with over 100 double sided 9.4gb disks.(Wish I could say the same for DAT tapes).

shim

Go here: http://www.ebuyer.com/

Good prices and delivery..

I've bought several HDDs by mail order and they've all been fine and dandy. They're not so delicate that they can't take some bumping around.

You'll save money by buying online, and have the latest technology.

You won't know that a drive in a dealer's shop hasn't been thrown around either.

The External drive that died was an Iomega 1Tb unit bought from a reputable dealer locally.

They checked everything and only stopped short at removing the disk itself from the USB board, that would have messed up the warranty.

When the diagnosis was a dead drive they replaced the complete unit with a WD Lifebook of the same capacity.

I now have what's left of my photo's backed up on 3, yes 3 drives. The disk writing session should be this evening.

I buy most of the PC accessories / components from ebuyer ( http://www.ebuyer.com/ ) or from Dabs ( http://www.dabs.com/ ) and I'm quite happy with them. In ebuyer you won't pay for the delivery on orders over £50 with super saver delivery. Both stores pack goods well in some plastic air-bags, so courier dropping the box is not that disastrous.

We had problems at work with Dabs over a harddrive that didn't work. We waited over a month for their carrier to pick it up and for them to do a refund because we had already replaced it with one from MicroDirect.

I'm only after a 320gb for an old W98SE box that I still use for anything other than photography/video. The old HD (Maxtor) was dying. Neither Scan nor ebuyer seem to have much in and ebuyer seem expensive (about £62 for a 400gb). There's one at Aria for £40 which I think I'll go for link
It's the same as the Recertified drive I've got on at present so I can just keep that as a clone.

Last time I got something from Aria I bought a couple of these SD Card Readers for an unbelievable 99p each... Brilliant sadly no longer in stock. 2nd fastest card reader (Singim SG365S SD/MMC) tested on this site for 133x cards link

Just noticed he has an interesting list of speeds for about 50/60 SD Cards with the above reader

shim

Another interesting site for SD Card Benchmarks

shim