I think i just killed my hard drive, help?

[gWeezY]

my computer was frozen during a rendering with Terragen so i decided to just press the reset buttun. I think the hard was in the middle of a read/write operation as the hard disk light was on. After it hit reset and the computer booted it froze a while during the POST screen. Then i get a message about not finding a boot disk. When i entered the bios the primary IDE master is blank. Only my DVD/CD-Rom drives are listed in the bios.
Is this is the sign of a DEAD hard drive? If not how can i recover.
N.B. booting from the XP disk does not help as there is no hard disk present to repair.
Please Help

[redwudz]

I've had that situation and saved the HD by booting from a W98 bootdisk. Use fdisk to delete all partitions, then create a new partition, then you should be able to reformat with your XP disc.

[guns1inger]

Before going sompletely nuts, try booting off a win98 bootdisk, then rebuilding the master boot record with fdisk /mbr

This might get things back on track without sacrificing everything.

[thevoelk]

See if your computer has an auto-config option in BIOS. For example, with the newer Dell's, (not that I have one, we use these at work) if you go into BIOS and hold ALT and press F, then hold ALT and press B it will flush the drive settings and force a refresh of all IDE drives connected to the system board. I think most modern BIOSes have an option similar to this. You could also try to set the primary drive to Auto, and see if it's picked up. Also, before you go through the hassle of formatting and reinstalling XP, boot to the XP CD and go to the recovery console. You'll need the Administrator password, be sure to use the admin account not an admin account. At the command screen, run "chkdsk /f" or "chkdsk /r" without the quotes. You can also use fixmbr to fix the master boot record like gunslinger said. Also, see if you can locate a friend that has Parition Magic, you can repair a parition with it and it will automatically locate drives for you. I'm not sure if they still do, but Partition Magic used to have a free trial you can download as a bottable floppy, but that may have changed now that Symantec has bought them out. Most likely your drive is not dead. If you feel comfortable doing it, remove the side of your case and power on your workstation. If you can hear the drive spinning, you're probably in good shape. If you hear a constant clicking coming from the drive, your drive is pretty much shot.