Hard Disk failed while reboot!

[forester]

The windows98 can't restart now.
When I push down the power button on the machine box,
I get the first screen showing the info of BIOS, audio driver and pnp, and also a line of text as " the primary master hard driver failed", this is also the screen showing the "Press DEL to enter setup". After that, there is no any other more procession.
The IDE cable is connected to the hard drive and the power cable is connected to it too,

My questions is, is the hard disk physically damaged or any other reason. How can I restore the HD to work?
Thanks for any help!

[M Owen]

Preliminarily I'd say that it's time to get a new hard drive ...:D

[cvogt61457]

Probably a bad HD. Hard drives consist of a platter spinning at
high speed. This is a mechanical assembly - bound to wear out
eventually.

There are companies that can retrieve data from crashed HD's.
There's no guarrantee on the data recovered.
They do cost. Depends on how much the data on the bad HD is
worth to you.

They can diagnose the problem to determine if the HD is the problem
or if the controller is at fault.