Accessing HD by bypassing BIOS?

My mom's Seagate ST38421A died after my sister's kids installed a game on her computer (I do not think the kids caused the problem, however.) The HD was factory installed into a Compaq 5441, and my attempt to diagnose the problem is the first time that anyone has touched the innards of the PC since it was assembled at the factory approximately six years ago. The symptoms are a strange singing sound as the computer starts up (my mom says that the sound was present for a time before the drive failed; the sound is NOT the BIOS beeping). After trying to boot from the HD, the CD-ROM, and the floopy disk. the computer announces a boot problem, and asks me to provide a system disk.

The HD is the only device connected to the second IDE controller of the computer. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-5SMM.

What I've done:

-Booted from drive A: system runs MS-DOS fine, but declares a "Invalid drive specification" when I try to switch over to C:.

-Tried to use Compaq's restore disk, but the system could not find the HD; the restore program asks me whether I want to restore again or exit the program.

-Swapped the drive into my working Compaq 5204; no sound, but same error. Same difficulties with accessing C:

-Tried to see whether the BIOS in my mom's computer has a HD diagnostic function; it doesn't. (Just a fuction that allows me to choose the boot device order. Fooling around with that didn't change the error message.) The BIOS is from Award; according to the chip's label, it is "PCI/PNP"-aware, and has a sticker that says "1.2B".

-Spent two nights downloading Debian Linux, burned the image on a CD-R, and tried to boot off the CD; the same boot error message popped up.

-Downloaded Seagate's OS-independent diagnostic tool, and it doen't work because the BIOS apparently can't see the HD. The program can talk to the HD controllers, however.

-Finally, I popped off the jumper on the drive that changed the connection from "cable select" to "slave". Booted from drive A:. The HD still could not be found.

I cannot believe, aside from a possible mechanical problem that has caused a major malfunction/destruction of the HD's inner workings, that it is impossible to talk to the drive via software, somehow.

Does anyone have a suggested solution, or should I give up?

-d

.

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