Hard drives are doomed, help me save data

[Asazman]

I have 2x Maxtor 200GB hard drives at RAID 0 with my Promise TX2000 RAID card, a few days ago I heard a click from my hard disks and everything froze for about four seconds, then I regained control and everything was normal....then about a day later, I restarted and I couldn't get into windows, I got a black screen after the windows boot screen. I repaired my Windows XP install and all hell broke loose.

I heard clicks from my hard drives again during POST, turned my system off to let the hdds cool and I tried again the next day, so far no more clicks.

Now I am having trouble doing just about anything, when I run an application, it either freezes or take 5 minutes to show up

While installing windows it checked the disk and fixed errors, ran a CHKDSK while I was at class and when I came back I was in windows, so a good sign

For some reason my DVD writer is not being detected....I don't have any more hard drives, except a SATA but this board does not support SATA.

thanks.....

 

[jrbryner]

Clicking = bad mojo coming very soon. I've had it happen and lost 80gb of work. Just about made me puke.

I'd recommend backing everything up onto cd/dvd, and until you do, don't use that computer unless you REALLY REALLY REALLY need to (read: to prevent nuclear holocaust)

 

[Asazman]

well that's what i figured, but I'm having trouble backing up (those are my only usable hard drives)

I ran CHKDSK for a second time, no errors of any kind, and no clicks

It seems like my CPU time only comes in bursts though, like when i click on burn in nero and nothing happens for about ten minutes, same happens with other stuff. example: click on IE/mozilla, nothing happens but 5 mins later they both come up at the same time. nero is frozen right now but i'm able to use ie.

 

[MOC]

In a Panick situation like that ,and if time was a problem
you could always start burning data to CD's .