I've been putting off a computer upgrade for a while. A disk crash of one of its two IDE drives has finally given me enough reason to do so. One disk, the C drive, is the primary master (and boot disk), and the other, the D drive, is the primary slave. Everything was fine one morning while I was browsing some files in Explorer on the C drive. When I clicked to switch to the D drive I heard a slight mechanical click, then my mouse and keyboard froze up and I noticed the hard disk light was solid red (continual disk access).

I completely powered off my computer and then restarted. During booting neither hard disk could be found and it hanged with a 'no boot drive' message. After trying a few things, I found that if I disconnect the ribbon and power cables from the D drive the computer operates fine on just the C drive. When I reconnect the D drive I get the no boot drive message again. As is perhaps typical, the C and D drives are daisy-chained on a single ribbon cable that's plugged into the primary IDE connector.

Given all that, is there anything I can do, or more likely place I can go, to fix the D drive or at least get the data off of it. As part of my upgrade process, I've already completely copied over my C drive to my new computer using an ethernet crossover cable. Ideally (and probably wishful thinking on my part) I'd like just some temporary hacked fix of the D drive so I could reconnect it long enough to get the data off. Are there any Pantip Plaza shops or other places that could do something like this? Barring that, I'd like to know what other data recovery options I have. Maybe I'm being naive, but for a drive that seemed to be working OK right up until that moment I tried to access it, it can't be massively trashed.

Remove the drive, place it in an ziplock bag and then put it in the freezer overnight. Let it get back to just below room temperature the following day and place it back in your PC, this may give you enough time to pull the data off before it goes for good.

Some may think this is an urban myth, but i've done it successfully 3 times, and a few friends have also done the same. GL.

One other thing, check the jumpers on both your drives, if they are set to Cable Select (CS) this may be causing your machine not to boot. Check they are in Primary and Secondary positions respectively.

Contact Simplicity in Bangkok, ask for Alex - his company successfully recovered 100% of the data when my computer crashed a couple or so years ago and subsequently installed a "RAID" system which automatically backs up to a 2nd hard drive. Contact me via Yahoo, Skype or MSN IM if you can't locate them