C.T. Paterson wrote: : I rather suspect answers to both are "No", but you folks tend to be : smarter than I. It's been some time since I've worked in data recovery, but I suspect your suspicions are correct. : Things I have discovered: : : 1. The bios does not see the drive when internally installed in its : home machine. That's not a good sign. Usually means that, save specialized hardware or placing the platters in another case, your HDD is toast. Or, of course, shipping it off to a $2500/hr data recovery facility. Are you actually pushing the BIOS through a full auto-detect? Jiggle the cables? Blow on the connectors? Make sure you do it in that order... Does the BIOS just fail to find it as though it was never there, or does it hang as though it seems like it's found something, but can't quite reconcile with the drive? (This may all be a moot point.) : 2. When I opt to watch the POST, I see it get to "GRUB", but it stops : there. I'm having some difficulty reconciling this with point 1. Any other hard drives in the system? USB fobs stuck in the back? CDs in the CD-ROM? Floppies in the floppy drive? : 3. I have installed the drive into a external-USB case, and currently : have it connected to my laptop. A tail of the syslog reveals the : following (more after the log)... <snip a whole lot of errors> : 4. Monitoring the /dev directory, I saw /dev/sdb pop up briefly before : disappearing. Between #3 and #4, it sounds like the drive has enough in it to give a gasping, dying breath, but when asked what, in fact, it is, there's not enough life left to provide a full response. : 5. Still watching the syslog, I no longer see messages as above. Now : it's just... Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. It could be either that your system has cached that the drive is no good, or that, while you were testing it in the USB enclosure, it went off to that big, binary graveyard in the sky. - Damian