Is this HDD repaireable;it deleted partations by itself

[joshuu]

There is this HDD that was working fine and one time it frooze and shut itself off and upon restarting it showed that there is no fixed disk present. I did start the computer with a start up disk and then the startup disk showed that there is no fixed disk present.I check the status with the fdisk and shows that there is no fixed disk.Iam very confused cos this has never happened to me any other time.I want to partition it but Iam not sure if its going to be fine.One more thing is that it was 20 GB with only one partation i.e C and the last one day before all this happened it started to freeze and hang for about 5 or so minutes and then it 'clicks' and you could hear it running and all goes well for some minutes b4 it happens again.I dont know if after partationing again it would be fine or this is the end of this harddisk.Any suggestions?

[Catweazle]

I would not trust the drive again. Hearing clicking sounds from it, then having the drive disappear is a pretty sure sign of problems, I'fd think. Does BIOS detect the drive?

Even if BIOS is having periodic problems detecting it, I'd replace the thing.

[joshuu]

Infact even the bios doesn't see it

[Catweazle]

It most likely has turned into a paperweight then, I'm afraid.

[alc6379]

Eww... clicking?

Try a forum search about putting your hard drive in a freezer. DMR and someone else posted some stuff about this, and some have reported success in temporarily resurrecting "dead" drives.

Heck, since the drive's dead, it wouldn't hurt to at least try.

[ikenfixit]

You can recover some w/spinrite if it will still spin up. This is generally a one time deal. Get your data and a new drive.

[ikenfixit]

Also.. The freezer trick does work on occasion! But same thing.. Get the data and trash it..

[Puckdropper]

Just a FYI... (Clicking drives are bad things!)

If you just lost the partition table, there's a program called MBRWork that may be able to restore it for you.

There's also a Linux utility called "gpart" that can detect and restore your partitions. I couldn't get MBRWork to work, but Gpart did. I shut my computer off before it had written the data in the hard disk cache and lost the partition table.

[oalee]

click, click, click, click... if you ever get it to work, salvage what you can and get rid of that HDD. It's gonna be next to useless after a while...