I have two Western Digital hard drives in an external enclosure. One is a 12 gig and the other is a 40 gig. Quite literally overnight, both drives stopped working. Windows would no longer pick them up and assign drive letters. I have since removed both drives from the enclosure and tried to put them on internal IDE cables to no avail. Both hard drives are exhibiting the same symptoms depending on how I set the jumpers. (I don't remember exactly which combinations caused which symptoms, hence why I am not listing them.) They can both be seen by BIOS, but only after booting to Windows and rebooting. Under the same circumstance but with a different jumper setting, even Windows will SEE the drive, but remains unable to assign a drive letter. Using the "New Hardware Wizard" ends with the same result: the hardware not being installed properly. Also, depending on jumper settings, the BIOS Post will hang for a long time before kicking into the Windows progress bar screen. Windows loading can also take several minutes (upwards of 10) on a computer that usually loads in under 35 seconds.

So, the question: "Are both drives totally dead?"

As unpredictable as hard drives can be, I have to allow for the possibility that both had catastrophic physical failures at the exact same moment while not under power. I keep hoping there is something I am missing. Given the drives seem partially detectable, that is another reason I don't want to believe they are both dead yet. Is there a recommended disk recovery tool/software I should be using; something that could recover data off a partially damaged drive? I'd love to run a scandisk, but as I said before, Windows won't assign drive letters to them.

Any and all help is appreciated. If there are questions you have about the problem please post them and I will fill in any missing information or run any tests you feel are valid.

I appreciate everyone's time who read this.

They both fall maybe when you weren't around an someone else pt them back hoping you wouldn't notice?