<p>This is the basic process to start doing diagnostics on your damaged hard drive. The point is to help you determine what the problem is so that you know if it's the board, the heads, media, etc. I will do a shotgun approach to diagnostics by the process of elimination, but more significantly explain when you should STOP before destroying your chance at important data.</P><p>For example, if you have a hard drive that you cannot see at all in the BIOS that does not mean it can't be read using something smarter than your motherboard. Yet can you tell if it's a head problem or a firmware issue? Well, if you know the basics of the "POST" process for a modern drive, you might know that if you could see a serial number that the head probably read data from the drive after being instructed to by the firmware. So the real question is, why can't you read the data?</p><p>These are the topics I am going to cover from my experiences in running a successful data recovery company for 10 years. If you are interested in fixing drives, or just a better understanding of how the drive works, then this is the talk you don't want to miss. </p>