Hard Drive not picking up speed.

Coffin, I if another drive works in the same PC then the problem is probably the physical drive itself. If you have data you need your best chance is to install a new drive in your PC, install and configure a new copy of your operating system. Once you have that done then take your old drive and connect it to your PC as a "slave" drive. If the drive will spin up then you might be able to pull the data off. I suspect that if the drive starts up then spins down in a continuous pattern you have a problem with the drives spindle motor or its controlling electronics and that is beyond the repair abilities of most users. If the data is worth lots to you it can be sent to a commercial data recovery specialist. Be prepared since these folks are pricy. Another alternative if the data isn't very important to spend big bucks on is replacing parts on the hard drive. Depending on the part this is very risky and not usually a viable option unless you happen to have an IDENTICLE drive, time and the ability to risk the data. Let us know how things go and please don't forget to rate this post.

You might try the hard drive in a different PC, just to check you haven't got a duff power supply, but in all liklihood, you're going to have to buy a new hard drive and restore from your backup. A.