Can anyone help out my dad? It spins up but doesn't read. He's not told me what type it is or anything, but I can find out. Any ideas?
Internal or external? I'd also recommend trying it if possible with another computer. Power supply issues can cause this occasionally if it isn't getting enough power, also some hard drives when dying will work on some pcs not others (had this exact issue recently with a Seagate Barracuda with an external dock not working but external cable did) :S Also worth running something like HDDhealth or HDTune. Or trying any of the manufacturers diagnostic/SMART tools as my guess is it's probably dying rather than anything else.
If the health checks Etw mentioned show it as being a bad drive, I'd boot up a copy of Knoppix (or potentially any Linux distro, but Knoppix seems to be the most used in these situations, not sure why) and start copying everything off that drive ASAP. Afaik, Linux is a lot more tolerant of failing/failed drives than Windows is.
