Harddrive Failure

Hi all,
If got a 40gig Quantum Fireball about 18months old, installed as a
secondary drive, and my machine gives me the message that there is a drive
failure. When i change its configuration to master from slave and replace
the master with it, and enter windows at the command prompt ( using the F8
key), it says that it cannot detect any hard drive. Ive tried autodetecting
using the bios, but it does not see it. It was working fine, now its not, no
hardware/software changes in between.

When i switch the machine on the green light on the bottom of the harddrive
goes on briefly, and the disk spins fine.

Is there anything I can do to
1. Get this working and recover the data on it or
2. if i cant sort out 1, can i get any value from the drive?

What is likely to cause such a catastrophic failure of the drive without
warning?

Thanks in advance


MB is Abit BX6, Celeron 1.1, and win98SE


Gerry Abbott