Ahhhh, why do these things always seem to happen to me at Christmas.

Playing Skyrim earlier and it starts freezing for a couple of seconds regularly. I quit out of Skyrim and its doing the same in windows.
So I thought maybe it just needs a reboot, I rebooted and get "Ultra DMA Mode-5 S.M.A.R.T Capable but Command Failed" for the drive I keep my games on a WD5000KS-60MNB0. Once windows had finished booting there's no sign of my games drive.

Rebooted again and went into the bios setup and the drive shows up just fine there but its still a no show in windows.
I've checked all the cables and everything seems OK so I'm at a loss as to what it can be.

Any one got any advise or is the drive dead ?
There's no critical data on it if it is, just my games so I can re-install those, problem is what with the HDD prices going through the roof I cant really afford a new one at the moment so if its fixable that would be great, I'm not too hopeful though

I Had a similar issue a while ago (like 2003ish). never fixed that and reformatted/lost everything on that drive (bunch of SVCD Music Videos and stuff that i had edited).


happened again a few years later, and i think i had to do FixMBR, not sure.
File system is gone or part of the disk is not accessible. (Try downloading Get Data Back, and see if you can recover the partitions)

Thanks for the suggestions Skate Zilla.
I've got the drive to show up in Disk Management but it says it need initialising, when it attempts to do so it fails with an I/O Devise error.
I also tried Get Data Back but that says it cant find any file system on the disk, I cant find an option in it to recover the partitions.

did you do the full scan that usually takes 1 hour to 3+ hours depending on Size, Damage, Bus Speed.

The full scan doesnt look for file systems, it scans each sector for files.

from there you can browse select and recover any files it finds.

I downloaded the Western Digital software and run the scans that come with it.
Its quick scan fails the SMART test but the extended scan quits after a while with an message saying too many bad sectors.

I've accepted now that the drive is dead and there wasn't any data on it that I really need to recover so no big deal, most game saves are on the C drive so that's good, I would have been pissed if I'd lost 140 hours of Skyrim saves but that's safe.

I'v just sold my old basket case motorcycle that was in the loft so I'v got £500 burning a hole in my pocket now. I'm going to get a new drive out of that but I'm also tempted to blow the lot and get a 3Gb GTX580 too.

Check warranty status...

http://support.wdc.com/warranty/index_end.asp?lang=en

I should have mentioned that, Already done and its out of warranty.