2nd Hard DRIVE?!?! DEAD???

[ginboy21]

I recently booted up my computer and found that it was a bit sluggish. I gave it some time to boot up and when it finally booted up I wanted to give it a nice shut down and let it reboot again. When I rebooted again, it took me to the automatic scan disk. I let it continue and waited until it was finished. It returned me to the XP Desktop and everything seemed to look fine, but to my surprise my second hard drive wasn't showing up. I have two hards, a primary and a slave. My primary hard drive was there but when I clicked on My computer to see my 2nd drive it wasn't there. The icon was there but all my data was not there. I had a problem last month about this hard drive also. Once again, my computer was acting a little sluggish and when I clicked on my 2nd drive, it said it was not properly formatted. That drive was full of data, so I couldn't really recover it and just clicked format. IT was running for a few weeks until now. There's nothing in the hard drive. Is this a bad hard drive?

 

[micker377]

Go to the harddrive's manufacturer's web site and download the diagnostics for the drive. I'd also change the IDE cable, they can be intermittant. What type drive and what type cable (40 or 80 wire)?

 

[ginboy21]

It's a western digital 80 GB. What were the steps i should do?

 

[micker377]

Go to the Western Digital web site. Look in "customer service" (or somthing like that) and download the diagnostic program (and instructions) for the drive. You may need a "boot disk" and run from DOS.

 

[billy71]

On my Dells using WD Drives you can.
Restart, hold down on the Ctrl and Alt at the same time and press the D (character D) key when you see the log on screen. I usually Hold down on the Ctrl and Alt then start clicking the D key as it is booting, it will go into the test mode and you will need to wait until it is finished.
Looks like it is dead to me.
Billy