Probably dead hard disk please help

Just over a month ago I built a new computer with a Western digital 320GB SATA hard disk (Ebuyer quick find 11416)
Last night while scanning with avast antivirus the computer froze and the hard disk started making a lot of noise like a horrible scratchy clicking.
The computer then showed a blue screen for a few seconds before restarting. I didn’t have time to read the error message.
When it was restarting it came up with another error “boot disk failure”
tried restarting a few times and it came up with some other errors while the hard disk continued making lots of noise. On one occasion it seemed to start to boot windows and then complained that it couldn’t due to a missing .dll file, saying that re-installing might help. Now it doesn’t even display an error, it just gets past the BIOS post and sits with a blinking cursor in the top left hand corner.

Tried to boot from the Windows CD ROM but the following happened
Setup is inspecting Hardware Configuration
Setup is loading files
Setup is Starting Windows
BsoD 0x0000007F {0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000 0x00000000}

could that mean that something else is wrong other than the hard disk? what would be the best way to try and recover data from the disk?

Rest of Spec:
ASUS Striker Extreme 680I SLI Socket 755
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (Stock cooling)
2* Corsair 1GB DDR2 800MHz
WD 320 GB 7200RPM 16MB cashe SATAII/300
ASUS EN8800GTS 320Mb
X-Fi Xtreme Audio Soundcard
Antec 900 case
Hiper 730W PSU

 

First, to get the blue screen to stay on right-click my computer- properties- advanced tab- startup and recovery- settings- and untick Automatically restart. I do this every time I install XP. To check your drive before returning it, run WD's DataLifeguard to make sure your drive is bad and you have something to report to them. BTW, a noisy drive is never good. You can slave the drive in a working system first as the more you use it, the less likely you'll be able to recover data.

 

I agree with audiodoggie, a noisy drive is never a good sign. Hook it up like audio said, and try to get the data off as quickly as possible.

If you are overclocking, reset to stock. Try removing the offending hard drive, set the boot order in the BIOS to boot from CD (if you have not already) and see if you can boot off a bootable CD. Memtest would be a good test to run also.

Good luck, hard drive problems are never fun.

E

 

Ok I tried using the western digital data lifeguard and it said no western digital drives found.
I completely unplugged the hard drive from the computer and then tried booting from the Windows CD again. This time there were no errors so the rest of the machine seems ok.
I'm running memtest now and so far so good.
Will try and slave the drive in my brother's computer later.
Thanks for your help so far.

 

Luckily the drive is under warranty, so free replacement is in your future. Unfortunately, it looks like all your data may be gone. If the Western Digital diagnostic couldn't see the drive, it is probably 100% dead For future reference, the BSoD number 0x0000007F is usually a hard drive failure of some type; sometimes only corrupt files or messed up file systems will cause the 0x07F, and sometimes it's a prelude to complete failure....

hd2k

 

Looks like you found the problem. Always sucks when hardware dies, but you only lost one thing, so it could have been worse!

E