Laptop Hard Drive Problems

[mheisig]

So the other day my wife's laptop hard drive went on the fritz. She came home from work and it had evidently rebooted and all it showed was "Operating System Not Found." I had a similar problem with my desktop about two months earlier and was able to recover the data from the drive.

It's a Seagate 40GB 2.5" drive. So far I've tried using a 2.5" to USB adapter, and two different 44 to 40 pin adapters. I've tried all three adapters on two different systems, and none of them will recognize the drive. Not recognized in BIOS with either 44-40 pin adapters, and not recognized as a USB device with that adapter. From what I looked up online the jumper setting for the Seagate drive as a slave device is no jumper on at all, which is what I have it as.

When connecting it to my desktop I've tried it as a slave device on both the primary and secondary IDE channels, with 4 different ATA cables.

One weird thing: on my desktop I have two hard drives (master and slave config) and two DVD drives (master and slave). I've connected the laptop drive as the slave chained to both the master hard drive and the master dvd drive, but when I boot up the entire channel isn't recognized (in other words, both the master and slave device aren't recognized in BIOS). If I take the laptop drive off from the slave position and boot up with no slave device at all, the master is recognized.

Sorry for the long winded explanation. My wife has alot of pictures and stuff on there that she wants to recover, and I'm running out of ideas.

Any suggestions?