My primary hard drive (as in the one with Windows on it) gave up the ghost on Friday. On Thursday night I reset the IP stack, and everything seemed OK but Friday morning it was NTLDR is missing.
BIOS doesn't see it, my USB to SATA device isn't detected by my laptop when I connect the SATA drive to it. I've never had a drive just die out of the blue like that. They used to go through a series of bad sectors before dying. This time though it was very abrupt, and while I can hear and feel the thing spin, it is completely unrecognized. It's a 1.5 year old Samsung 500gig hard drive so I'm surprised it failed so quickly. I doubt it was even a third full at the time it died...
I've already tried freezing it to no effect. Someone recommended the spin into a wall trick, and whack it in the lower left corner trick but I'll search around a bit before resorting to such tactics.
The data on that drive is something I would like to have but it's not something I want to pay a professional data recovery service for.
Thought about buying a SSD to replace it but instead spent $55 on another 500gig SATA.