Powermac Not Reading Hard Drive

I've got a 400 Mhz Powermac, and I had a 300GB Barracuda hard drive installed. I know that technically she can't take a drive that big, but I found a special driver which allowed me to split it into a couple partitions, all of which could be read by OS X. I was quite happy with this, but rather recently, I believe the drive has died (this is after about a year of rather mild use).

I didn't notice a steady degration of performance. The drive just stopped reading one morning.

There is a slight whining sound to the drive, and when I try to boot the mac up, I get the finder with a question mark symbol. I booted the mac up from a USB external hard drive, and it seemed to operate fine, although disk utility was not able to see the internal hard drive at all.

Is my hard drive toasted? Anything I can do? There aren't all that many files on it, but if things can be recovered with little effort, it would be a bonus.

Sounds like the Hard Drive is toasted. Fortunately, most drives have 3 year warranties on them, so you can likely get it replaced by the manufacturer for free. If you want to try to get stuff off the drive and are willing to spend a bit of money, try Data Rescue II. It has saved me a few times and retrieved data that would have otherwise been lost.

I would think… if Data Rescue sees the drive that it might be repaired. If Data Rescue sees the drive I would use it to recover the data, then I would try a repair utility like TechTool Pro to correct the problem.

I'm using a 250gb drive (as I type) that was discarded by a business because the tech was convinced it was dead. I asked if I could have it…I then let TechTool Pro do the thing that it does best and the drive has been working great for the past year and a half.

Data rescue uses different methods to find the drive than Disc Utility. None of the drives that I was able to get data off were recoverable by Disc Utility.