If the hard drive is not spinning up, I'm afraid the
internal electronics are fried and nothing you can
do at this point except regret not making periodic
backups of your files.

Hard Disk Drive Failure Report:
Increasing failures on Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 hard disk drives
http://www.intellirecovery.com/news/...26039325917736

You can try contacting a hard drive recovery firm
such as DriveSavers:
http://www.drivesavers.com/

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

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"nat" wrote:

| I have a Maxtor 120GB Hard drive that cannot be detected by my computer. This
| is how it all happened: I put on my computer and it was running fine, but
| after about 20 minutes I began to hear an unusual sound, some windows closing
| on their own. This prompted me to shut down, which was successful. Upon
| opening my system unit, I discovered that the hard disk was exceedingly hot.
| I allowed the hard disk to cool down, covered my system unit and powered on.
| This was the point the bios refused to detect the presence of the harddrive.
|
| On the other hand, when I touched the body of the hard drive I noticed that
| It wasn't spinning.
|
| Please advice me on what to do to solve this problem as I have tonnes of
| important files I cannot afford to miss.
|
| Sincerely,
|
| Nat