hard drive failure any hope??

poppellerant

To add what to gik said, I would personally put the drive in an airtight container then freeze overnight. In the meantime, point a fan or two where you intend on placing the harddrive.

To save time and avoding the harddrive heating up, I wouldn't mount the harddrive inside the case. Prepare the data and power cables where the harddrive can lay flat or upright.

Using the freezer and fans method, you might have about 20 minutes to get your most important files. So it might be an idea to also familiarise yourself with your intended software to copy the files from the harddrive.

macman

Try accessing the data on the disk via a USB hard drive caddy on another device before you do anything else. Simple, quick and costs about a fiver.
The freezer technique is commonly suggested, but does not often work in practice. By all means try it, but not as a first option.

Heedtheadvice

Finding out if it is a hard drive failure before seeing if you can recover files by such methods as listed above about cold effects! You might just damage the drive taking it out and putting in freezer - note the comments about a sealed bag that is aimed to prevent moisture getting into it. This is most likely to occur when you take the cold drive out of the freezer/bag with lots of condensation where you might not want it!! So it's a risk with no guarantee you can recover anything and maybe something. It's an all else has failed approach.

Do download and burn a drive test cd as I mentioned above. You have NOTHING to lose doing that provided you follow the diagnostic instructions given by the manufacturer. Do that rather than assume any particular fault. These can be tried afterwards.

For anybody else( i.e. not the OP at present) who do not even think they have a problem it may well show up that your drive is failing, even if current files are not affected, and give you the opportunity to take action in advance of failure! Also good to have S.M.A.R.T. switched on in the drives options if available!

Blue snakes info about f8 is good and it is possible to power up and continually hit f8/shift f8 straight away until you see a response. Then, provided the hard drive has tested ok select the windows recovery options and do a windows chkdisk. As were the earlier comments about it not necessarily being a hard drive failure.