Thanks for all your responses - you have confirmed my worst fears!

Adam - yes, the first thing I did was to plug the HD into another PC. The bios
check showed it's parameters (size etc) to be zero.
Also, the HD could not be auto-detected at start-up. I repeated this test on
several other PC's so it really does look like the HD is gone!

Claudio - I've done an extensive search on the net for an identical drive. My
drive was just short of three years old and I didn't come up
with too many leads.....
The only place I found was computergeeks.com and by the time I got around to
ordering, they had none left.
If you have any links I have no problems with ordering from Europe!

I figured that the combined hoarding power of the list might be a good last
resort :-)

Spehro, Kyrre, Amaury and all who suggested a professional data recovery
service - yes this is probably what I will have to do, but I figured
if I could get an identical drive cheaply then it would not be a huge waste of
my time to try and swap controller boards.

Mike - thanks for both the offer and the advice! I'll mail you offlist about it.

Thanks

Alan

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic:
[PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads