Ho hum... my hard drive crashed and I am not sure how to fix it.

I noticed one day that my spare data drive "E" did not show up in explorer. I reboot computer, its still not there. Then next day computer is emitting loud buzzing sound, like the fan bearings are broke or something. I boot off computer..

Computer fails to restart!

I open case and (thinking that it's a bad drive) start removing the cable and power from each of my drives. I hope it is not my C drive that is gone bad cause it has my operating system on it.

By trial & error, I discover that ONLY my "E" drive is gone and computer runs perfectly fine if I do not install power & ribbon cable to E drive.

But if I install E drive power & ribbon, the computer beeps on power-up, and makes a loud continuous buzzing sound (guess its coming from the drive & not the CPU fan... ) the monitor does NOT start up and the computer does NOT boot up. So I unplug this bad drive and everything starts up fine.

Now, I have software for data-recovery, but I think it depends on the fact that I can start my computer normally WITH the bad drive installed. That does not seem to be my case.

What can I do?

If everything was working fine and then this happened it would indicate a bad drive
When you hook the cable back to drive, make sure the red or blue side of the cable faces towards the power input cable
Was there a power surge of any sort,
Try switching the cables around, the c drive cable to e and the e cable to c and see if it starts
If same situation, the drive is more than likely bad

I disconnected a known working datadrive and used THAT cable and power to connect the bad drive. Then turned PC on.

At least it booted up properly this time..

But the entier time the drive was all "buzz.. buzz.. buzz.. buzz. . buzz.." then delay, then "buzz .. buzz.. buzz.. buzz.. buzz".. and repeat until 10 times.. then the drive must do some sort of power cycle. Then buzz pattern again.

That went on for several minutes and then the drive made no sound at all.

Unfortunately it must have just powered OFF on its own or something because windows explorer can not find the drive. Also I right clicked on 'my computer' and selected manage, and still could not find the drive.

So, I have no idea how I can use software to recover the data. I think it's gone for good. What do you think?

Depending on how much you want to do with this drive, regarding size or data that is on it
You can get a sotware that can possibly help repair a partition
Here is just 1 link for some SW as an example, if you Google repair hardrive or repair partition, a lot of pages will come up


Recover Lost or Deleted Partitions. Repair Partition Table and fix partition Boot Sector error - EASEUS Partition Table Doctor (http://www.ptdd.com/recoverylostpartition.htm)