Useless (broken?) IDE HD

[Guilherme Soares Zahn <gzahn@cnen.gov.br>]

Hi there,

    I know it's somehow OT, but you were the only guys I thought could
give me some ideas...

    well... at home I've got a VA34324A Samsung HD (IDE, 4.3Gb) that
decided to stop working this weekend. As I'm completely out of money for
at least 2 months and short of backups for a big chunk of the data it
contains, I'd like to see if there's any way to put it back to service,
even if just for a short time. Here's what happens now that it's
installed as 2nd master in my work PC:

1) When I turn on the computer, BIOS recognizes OK it and it passes all
tests fine;

2) Linux boots, kernel recognizes hdc: SAMSUNG VA34324A, 4124MB w/478kB
Cache, CHS=14896/9/63, UDMA  (i.e.: fine);

3) fdisk sees all four partitions OK and warns of no problems;

4) When I try to mount any of the partitions, I get a lot of equal
messages:

hdc: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error
}
hdc: read_intr: error=0x04 { DriveStatusError }
ide1: reset: success

The FAT32 partition mount in the end, still gives me more error messages
but I can at least browse through it and retrieve some files) but the
ext2 won't mount (ext2 filesystem panic, of course, because of the read
errors).

When I boot Win98 (still w/ the broken HD as 2nd master), win98's fdisk
won't even notice there's a 2nd HD and Partition Resizer win warn of an
error (something like ¨partition 1 out of boundaries¨) and won't
recognize anything (not even the 1st HD)...

Now, is there any chance that it's not a hardware fault? If so, how
could I try to make it work? I'm accepting mostly every possible idea,
no matter how risky or absurd it may seem, as the worst that could
happen as losing the HD I can't use now!

TIA,

    Guilherme Zahn

PS: Please c/c myself on the replies, OK? Due to the heavy traffic on
the list I had to sign it through another e-mail address, and it's been
hard to check it lately!