Do you still have said hard drive? If so, what did it do? I may be able to help recover the data.
It made a whirring sound like it was spinning badly for several days on and off. During this time I should have backed everything up but by the time I was ready to do that it had kicked the bucket and no longer showed itself in the IDE chain at boot or in BIOS.
When it kicked the bucket it said "this is not a bootable volume please insert a boot disk" so I guess the boot sector got messed up?
So, since I had WinXP on there I just put FedoraCore5 on my other hard drive and assigned that as the boot volume during install.
So I unplugged it for like 4 months. Then I plugged it back in, now it doesn\'t make any noise and it *does* show upon boot. But Fedora Core 5 doesn\'t see it.