Broken hard disk
No, there's no data loss... at least not much, and in any case not with my system.
A few weeks ago, I rearranged my systems. rock became pop, folk was decommissioned (as was the old pop), and an SMP box that was given to me by Osamu Aoki became the new rock.
This last time, however, there was some problem. After placing pop's hard disk in its new home, and trying to boot it, I got an error messages from the BIOS instead of a booting system. So I tried to investigate. As pop is my parents' machine, and as they still run Windows after a failed attempt of mine to convert them, this means their data is on a VFAT partition. So I would boot pop from the Windows installation CD-ROM, and ran scandisk.
... which would find a lot of inconsistencies. At first, I instructed it to fix them; but as the number of inconsistencies turned out to be increasingly high, I told it to stop, and took a closer physical look at the hard disk. I didn't see anything wrong with it, but looking around on the disk showed an extremely corrupt data partition. My worst nightmare...
Actually, my dad's. But still.
At that point, I disconnected the hard disk from pop, and installed pop using a separate hard disk. Osamu had given me two spare hard disks along with the system he so nicely donated, so I could certainly use one of those disks. Pop's been running for a month or two with the new disk now, and it seems fine.
Of course, dad still wanted his data back. Something had gone wrong with the disk, and I didn't know what; I had put it back in the original pop, and had tried to boot that thing with a boot disk, s that I could exclude the possibility that it was in fact that machine being terribly broken, or so. Didn't appear to be the case – the disk showed corruption there, too.
It took me a few weeks of hoping the problem would go away until I got the idea of calling a friend of mine to help me out, as two minds know more than one. Kris had a look at the disk yesterday, saw that one of the IDE connector pins had broken off at the soldering point, soldered a wire in between, ran some recovering software on the disk, and copied dad's data to a CD-ROM.
To think that it was something that easy...
It does make me wonder about the quality of hard disks, though. The connector pin must have broken off because of the stress I put on it when removing the data cable from the disk; I can't think of anything else, and I do remember having to use quite some force to get the cable disconnected from the hard disk. Hardware sucks...
"soldered a wire in between"
I encountered such a problem, too. One of the pins in the IDE interface broken. Can you tell me how to do it or do it for me?
First, please get your keyboard fixed. Your '!' key is stuck.
On your question: it should be obvious how to do it, if you've ever done a little soldering. If you haven't, I suggest you buy a soldering iron, and start experimenting with things that may break, rather than things that are as critical as your hard disk.
If you want to be on the safe side, consider finding a friend who's good at soldering and asking him to do it, because one unforeseen movement of your hand (often done by the inexperienced) will destroy your hard disk, probably beyond repair.
In any case, do not use this as a permanent solution! Buy yourself a new disk, and only use the old hard disk with the wire for as long as you need to get the data off; then get rid of it.