Yes, it happened to me too... Tormie PC was sleeping   and when it woke up the main HD disappeared and was no more recognized by the BIOS...

A quick research on the net, that I want you to know just in case you've a similar model, resulted in knowing that certain Seagate models, from the Barracuda 7200.11 series (mine was a ST35003220AS) have a bios bug resulting in giving a costant "busy" state. And update for the HD bios is available on the Seagate support site, check if your model is involved before having the same fate.

If it's too late, there is a complicate procedure that someone is sharing on the net, it involves a communication cable of the same kind used for old phone, Hyperterminal (windows program), a solder and a set of commands to pass to HD.

Well, too much for me, actually the HD lies dead in the drawer, my chance to save something for it is linked to find an identical, used model on ebay.

Well, if the mess that I've here can be named "advantage" then the fact that I simply nest and pile up everything on one HD and simply move it on another disk saved a lot of the things that has a value for me, Posy   is on backup disk that I keep religiously in the drawer, the rest have to be rebuilt.

I was even lucky because I pay a service yearly for sending automatically spar reports on my email what they do is to connect to my email servers and download the emails, filtering them and keeping them on their own server, which I connect using IMAP, so they are still there (again because I NEVER went there to clean up the place   ), so my critical data are saved...

That could be the occasion to organize my Poser runtime from scratch and focus on what I need and maybe, doing it, I should begin to do something. I want to go back  on when I used simple things, like the great freebies that I've in gygabytes, and leave all the rest.

Bad news was that I lost my copy of the new Poser 8   , but I emailed Smith Micro being gentle and and using all the Italian olive oil that I've and they ( the employee is Emily Andree ) granted me a one time exception with a secret link for downloading it again, and even a new serial number (even if I've mine, it should work I think). That was nice, even if I didn't understand their policy of keeping the download available only for 1 month, even Micro$oft give the costumers a new media support for free if they lose or scratch the original DVD .

However I'm just downloading P8 for my (almost a) Mac.

About the HD, I made a deal with a little shop that I know and my Christmas gift consisted in two 1.5 terabytes HD , two because this time I'll keep one for the only pourpose of back up, using Time Machine (Mac OS backup utility).

I'm kept busy recontructing everything... I just did a backup of Posetteforever and now I'm doing it again (I'm using a freebie program that is called Filezilla that works great and even better than other commercial programs of the same kind), the site content has grown to more than 1 gig ...

Well, back to bussiness now, just remember to backup often  

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Well at least you got it working. But as you said a good back up saves hours of installing.

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Two wrongs don't make a right.
But six left turns will get you around the block
and back in the driveway again.

Yus.. "Back up files and Back them up OFTEN" is something I have learned the hard way.. and sometimes still ignore.  

Is there a PC repair place that may be able to to help you with the ever complicated process of BIOS repair?

But yes, definitely back up that download file that Smith Micro is allowing, as a 'just in case'.  Every program I download that costs me any money, I make sure I have that file or program on a CD or DVD.