We based one of our most popular pop quiz challenges on a situation every tech support person has faced or will face at least once: a failed hard drive. In that particular case, a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 user was getting errors like "disk 0 error" and "invalid drive specification." Here were the other facts in the case: -The data wasn't backed up. -The problem came out of nowhere. -The user had accessed Setup and tried to manually enter the settings for the drive type when "Auto" didn't work. -There was no startup disk made by this machine. Reviving a drive like that one—even if only long enough to copy its data before you throw the drive in the garbage—is a tough challenge. When I asked TechRepublic members how they would troubleshoot a situation like this one, we received over 200 solutions, and we heard from a number of TechRepublic members who wanted to know “what everybody else suggested.” So we decided to publish this collection of over 200 ways to revive a hard drive.
http://www.hddrecovery.com.au/downloads/200ways.pdf