Got home last night and booted up the pc and the screen sat at detecting ide drives. The cdrom drive came up ok, but the hard drive wasn't found, then the screen changed to BOOT DISK FAILURE insert disk. I tried this but no luck.

This morning I took the hard drive out and the disc is spinning up and then stops, sometimes the drive is detected , but it doesn't boot. I'm just formatting another drive, but there is some info I want off of the old drive.

The drive is a 500gb Maxtor sata, I got a USB caddy for IDE drives so I'm off to get a USB to sata connector to see if I can access the drive.

Any suggestions would be useful, thanks

The drive is probably fecked.

You might get some data off it if you put it in the freezer for a few hours, but no promises.

Usually if you use a dock (in my experience anyway) the drive will mount eventually and you can get the data off it.