So, I'm currently at my parents' house and will be for the next week or so. They have been having problems with their Pentium III 500MHz/320MB RAM/10GB HDD/Win98 (circa 1999) computer, but up until recently it was still working. Slowly and reluctantly, but working.

...until yesterday. I decided to use their computer rather than get my laptop out and changing all the (wired) internet stuff over, and I was in the middle of downloading Firefox 1.5.0.2 when the thing froze. This is not unusual at all, so I got out a pen and poked the indented reset button. Comp restarts, Windoze loads, everything's great. Mum then calls me to peel some potatoes and generally help her a bit in the kitchen, so I go and do that while it loads my profile on their computer. About half an hour later I go back to said computer to find it frozen again. Grrr. I restart it again. Then I get the following error: "Boot disk error. Please insert system disk and press enter". ¬_¬ Er... I press alt-ctrl-del which restarts the thing, but BIOS doesn't detect the hard drive and the same error appears. Restart again. Error. I go into BIOS setup and play around with the IDE auto-detection, but all it detects are the CD-ROM and Floppy Disk drives. :\ I changed the boot order and put a bootable CD in there and booted the computer using that, but the hard drive is still inaccessible.

After lunch, I took the thing apart and poked around at the parts. I'd noticed that the HDD read-write LED was constantly on, so suspected a loose connection somewhere. We'd previously been moving the comp desk because of the cat (don't ask. Use your imagination ¬_¬ ) so I thought that maybe something had got dislodged somewhere. Nothing though - everything was as it should be, albeit a little dusty. Sooo, dad got another hard disk and told me to see if the comp would recognise that one - it did. We then put the original disk back - boot error again. *Sigh* We tried plugging the drive in as primary slave and the other, working one, as primary master, yet even though we changed the jumper things and BIOS setup, it was still looking at the dead drive as master and only after failing to "see" it did it pick up the other. Grrr.

So we concluded that we do indeed have a dead drive, with 8GB of data on it that we can't retrieve. My parents don't have a CD writer or any other form of writeable removable media other than floppies so they couldn't really back up a lot of their stuff when the warning signs (i.e. the last year or so that this computer has been touch-and-go) started showing.
Does anyone have any tips on how to get the data back without having to spend £50/$100 per megabyte getting a professional to do it? According to this site, when BIOS doesn't recognise a disk it's usually due to one of three physical problems. Either:

1. There's an electronic fault causing the disk not to work
2. There's a problem with the disk's firmware, or
3. There's a mechanical problem.

BIOS will usually recognise the disk if it's a logical error, and being that it doesn't, it's probably physical. The site said that if it was number 1, BIOS would very quickly recognise no disk and would say so. This wasn't the case for us; we had the auto-detect going for some 30 seconds before it timed out saying there was no primary master. Number 3 usually involves some sort of suspect sound, such as clicking or grinding, and again this wasn't the case for us. This leaves me to think it's number 2... :\

Does anyone know more about these things than I do? If so, recommendations? Tips? Help? Anything?

Oh and on a completely different subject - my dad did his race last week and finished in just under 26 minutes. He raised around £800 ($1600) for prostate cancer. Thank you so much for any and all donations. Don't forget that you can still donate - just because the race is over doesn't mean the fundraising stops. Read this entry to find out more. :)