[H] Hardrive failure..

[Stan Zaske]

About a year ago a 4 month old WD 2000JB went bad on me so while I was 
waiting for a replacement drive I bought one of the then new Maxtor 250 
gig drives with 16 megs of cache. I thought that was very cool to have 
double the cache! Anyway, I got my WD back and it's been running fine 
ever since but now the Maxtor has gone bad. Just out of the blue my 
system got real sluggish and when I rebooted it wouldn't load XP. I was 
still able to use GRUB to get into Linux but Windows was a no-go.

I RMA'ed it today and was wondering if anybody knows of a way to 
save/erase the information on the drive before it goes back? The drive 
is completely inaccessible (AFAIK) and when I installed it into another 
box it stopped the POST and I was even unable to get into the BIOS. 
Remove the drive and everything returns to normal. Has anybody ever had 
this problem with some success accessing the drive?  TIA