Regrettably my Seagate EIDE 320Gig main hard drive failed last week with about 200Gig of photo's on it!! Fortunately however, it is under warranty until 2012 but the warranty doesn't appear to cover data recovery - of course I will want to recover the images.

Fault: Hard drive was performing as normal and then on 2 bootups displayed a NTloader error, on the next boot up the HD was not recognised by the machine and now it just makes ticking sounds. Sounds like the head armature is stuck or something similar.

I called around a number of places that deal with data recovery and have been quoted a three stage price system of about $250, $500 and $1200 depending on the level of recovery they need to escalate to. The ppl I was speaking to indicated that it was unlikely that the minimum charge would fix the problem as the drive would likely need to be taken apart and that would void the warranty.

I really should hvae backed up the drive a month or two ago when I was reformatting and reconfiguring the machine. I didn't have enough DVD's at that time as it would have taken about 25 of them to complete the task.

The cost is quite high and I am wondering if there is another way I might be able to kick start the drive with software or even send the drive internationally (Asia) for a less expensive service.

Any ideas?