I built my first PC (Shuttle SN95G SFF) 4+ years ago and it has worked almost perfectly ever since (Win2k SP4).

Last night I turned it on an it went through the boot screen and I noticed no IDE hard drives were detected. My LCD monitor stayed blank and the OS didn’t boot. I opened it up checked the connections, changed the GPU, went into BIOS and tried to manually select HD and it wasn’t listed. After spending 2+ hours trying to fix it I am not able to  load the OS.

I’m afraid my hard drive (250gb Seagate) has failed. The strange thing is that there were no warning signs I’ve read about before. Only about 25gb are free on the HD and most of my data is not backed up. I defragged it for the first time in 6 months 3 days ago, but it did start many times since then. I can’t fathom losing my 300+ pictures of my 3 month old DAUGHTER and it’s also my wife’s work machine so I need to fix it ASAP.

What do you THINK the HD has failed or is the problem caused by something else? How can I fix it? If the HD is dead how do I recover the data from it? Thanks in advance.
To find out if the drive has failed DLoad and run the Seatools diagnostics on it. Use the file to create a bootable CD and boot to it for this step.

The next thing you may try is removing the drive and HOOKING it up as a slave drive on a working machine...the drive jumper settings will be on top of the Seagate drive. MAKE sure it is set to slave. NOTE: You may also have to check the drive in the working machine to set it to master/w slave present....Western Digital's are common for this.

Once done boot the machine and give it plenty of time to start everything before doing anything...OPEN Windows Explorer and see if the drive shows up...if so you can now copy/burn whatever data you need...

Finally at this time you should start considering a regular backup strategy as all drives fail sooner or later.
I use and recommend Acronis True Image...but there are others.