In response to Seven Steps To Troubleshooting Hard Drive Problems (IT Professionals, October 12th, 2004), Gnomie Davis McCarn writes:

While this article provides some valuable information to help users
troubleshoot some hard disk problems, it also contains some outdated and
erroneous information that could easily result in unnecessary data loss.

The outdated information regards Cable Select, which became the de facto
standard in 1999 and is the primary type of cabling found in most computers,
not “uncommon” as the article states. With CS cables, the black connector is
the master and the gray is the slave.

Omitted is another tip which is to remove any other devices attached to the
IDE cable. Sometimes, the bad CD-ROM (or other device) will be what is causing
the problem.

And flat out wrong is the recommendation to run scandisk or chkdsk! Never,
ever, do anything which will write on a drive from which you want the data.
One of the more common failures is having the write circuits misbehave (for
many possible reasons) and these utilities can easily finish the job of total
destruction when the problem could be easily fixed.

Instead: First, take the drive to a working system - something that will boot
and allow for a place to put the data or run other utilities should it not
magically reappear. If it does appear, use Windows Explorer to copy your
files and then burn them to a CD or e-mail them to yourself.

Next, get a utility such as DiskChecker, which will
report the SMART status of the drive and allow you to do a non-destructive
read scan.

If any bad sectors are reported, the only safe option is to use another
program such as WinHex or HDWorkbench to do a
sector copy to another drive of equal or larger capacity.

Then, working on the copy, you can be as brave as you care to with a myriad of
tools to rebuild partition tables, correct FAT errors, or whatever the
situation demands.

I would mention that Fujitsu, Quantum, Maxtor, IBM, Toshiba, and Western
Digital have all produced entire series of defective drives within the past
four years and only some of them can be recovered. Many have firmware
upgrades that correct problems if they are performed before the drive fails.

Because I, too, have bills to pay (though, for me, it is secondary to the
help that I offer), I will close by adding that, should you decide to seek
help, the phone call [(704) 882-7551] is always free and I will help you to the best of my
ability.