Did that work? If it's a minor problem which affects a few system files that may work. I've had several hard drives fail and I've learned to simply not trust any hard drive. Backups are very important, but that advice probably doesn't help you now. Sometimes, if they won't spin up, you can get them to spin up by knocking them (very lightly) and/or cycling power a few times. If the head has crashed (scraped against the platter), you're probably out of luck. There are companies that offer services to recover files, but they're VERY expensive.
As soon as you start getting intermittent BSoD's and if you are able to boot successfully at all, you should back up your entire hard drive immediately. That's a sign that your drive's on its way out, and you should save what you can before it stops booting completely. The "cling" is definitely a bad sign.
The recovery "drive" is typically just a partition on the same hard drive. Do you know for sure it's actually a separate physical drive?
Same drive. My boyfriend connected it to his Linux system that's how I thought it was two drives, til he just told me it was the same drive
Great to hear!
