Oh God Please Help

[Kaneda]

Alright, last night I throw up an away message and go to bed. I wake up this morning to loud beeping sounds. I go to my computer and wake the monitor out of power save mode to find the splash screen for the mother board.

I hit tab and watch it check the ram and what not, then the rest of the information flies on by the screen. At this point I'm taken to a black screen where it says...

"Reboot and select proper boot device. Insert boot media into selected boot device."

So I restart and go into the BIOS. I check the hardware and I see my two DVD burners and my A: drive however my hard drive isn't being listed. I look at the temperatures for the CPU and the mother board and both seem very high to me.

Currently the CPU is at 120 degrees F and the motherboard is at 80 degrees F. I open up the box and see that the fan on the graphics card has completely stopped spinning.

I'm pretty desperate to get my data off my hard drive. The last backup I did was in November so I'm going to lose quite a lot of stuff. Rather than asking for a solution (since I think Im just going to buy a new computer -- fuck ABS computers, they suck terribly, I've had nothing but problems with their machine) I want to know what caused this?

I rarely ever turn off my computer or reboot unless required to for installing software. Until this morning my system was running totally fine. Hell I was even playing CS:S last night. It wasn't like there was a power surge which caused the system to reboot, everyone elses computer in the house was fine.

Here are some of the details:
I've got Win XP Home SP1 on a single 80 gig hard drive.
1 stick of 512 ram which is recogonized on bootup
Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor which oddly enough registers as having HT technology enabled dispite never having that when I bought it.

Could this be the hard drive just dying completely? If so what are the chances of me getting the data off it? Why would the motherboard be making such funky sounds. I don't even heard the hard drive clicking. Everything I've read from searching google talks about Windows Virtual PC which I've never had installed on the computer. Im so lost

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[thrash_head]

Ok, If you want data off.. Stick the hard drive in a good computer and make it the slave. Then boot up and right click and explore and go to the slave hd and back it all up. As for the computer, I would check and see if the PSU is good. If the fans don't power on that could be the problem. The Motherboard also sounds like it could be bad, use a new PSU and if that doesn't work i would say buy a new motherboard. You can get socket 478's for VERY cheap. If you do buy a new computer i'd like to buy the parts from you. I have a few socket 478 parts and if you wouldn't mind i'd send you money plus shipping on the parts on that computer. Get back to me on that k? Good luck with the troubleshooting!

[Bez]

Those temps aren't that high. Sounds like your hard drive died to me. I would do what thrash said and put your hard drive in a working computer and see if it recognizes it.

[Kaneda]

Turns out it was the HD making the nasty noises not the mother board. Im fairly confident the hard drive is unrecoverable. At this point Im just going to try another hard drive and a new graphics card.

Id hate to buy them though and find out its a problem with the mother board though. Right now Im torn since I already need to pony up for a new HD and a new graphics card...

[thrash_head]

Do you have a old computer sitting around? you can stick that hard drive in and reformat it and see what happens.. Then you will know with out buying parts and then being screwed.

[Mulchman MM]

Ghost might be able to access your dead-ish drive.

[Kaneda]

who/what is ghost? if anything is salvagable that would be awesome.

id forever love anyone who could help me pull information off that drive.

[Janus]

google around for some data recovery programs. You can format your drive and use the program to get the necessary files off of there. Don't expect any miracles, but if you needed some documents or something it might work.

Ghost is a program by Symantec/Norton that "ghosts" or images a hard drive and can recover the image and put it on another drive etc.