hard drive woes

[Jonathan Hutchins]

Kurt, if the BIOS isn't detecting it reliably, and the drive is showing the
kind of errors you report, I have to agree that banging it really hard on
the connector end is likely to do as much good as anything else.  When I
worked in a hardware shop, it seems like drives became more and more
unrecoverable as technology advanced.  I took that to mean that they were
reliable enough that they only failed if they were really, really dead.

The recovery utilities will help sometimes if there's been some sort of
system-level software error that has scrambled the low-level format, but
usually when something goes that wrong, it's more than just an error,
something's permanently broken.

At 30GB, the drive's probably old enough to be pusing into the age where
it's likely to fail anyway.  Even if you recover it, I don't think I'd trust
it with 30GB of work.