My harddrive (a Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11) started playing up after a couple of months of ownership. Was much louder when in operation, windows started doing a 'consistency check' on every boot and finding errors but seemingly not able to fix them.

I downloaded the Seagate DOS tools and tried to fix it that way, but to no avail.

Then it stopped booting up at all.

So I've bought another hard drive (exactly the same one), installed windows on it and everything is fine. I plug in the old hard drive to see if I can get any data off it but the PC won't boot with it plugged in.

I've swapped around the power cables, the SATA cables and still it hangs as though its always trying to boot off the faulty disk.

I've been through the BIOS to try and alter the boot sequence but it seems to make no difference.

The jumper settings on it seem to be to limit the data rate, not to set up a master/slave.

I have a USB caddy for 3.5" hard drives but it only has IDE connections, I don't have one for SATA connections.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how the hell I can try and retrieve the data off it or is this a lost cause?

I'm quite concerned a hard drive could fail like this after only a couple of months ownership...

Here is a lesson learned, if a hd starts to act up, it time to get any data you want to save off the drive before it dies. This is especially true of the old MFT delayed write fail. Time for an RMA.

I have receive HD's from the store DOA. When I buy a new drive I run the makers tools on it before I put it into use.

I already had an external hard drive on which I put nightly backups so, hopefully, I've not lost anything important.

Its all the 'not so important' stuff I've lost which ends up being actually rather annoying