Another Hard Drive Problem

[ziptop]

I pulled an old Seagate Medalist Pro (ST52520A) from my parents old PC (a really quite old 100Mhz pentium) It was working fine in that machine the last time I saw it up and running. However, having packed it in an anti static bag and shipped it home with me on the plane (oops would being in a cold aircraft cargo hold screw it up?) it no longer seems to work so well.
I've plugged it up to a couple of different systems, both as stand alone Primary master (It has Win95 OS installed) and also as a secondary master to another OS (Winxp) and though the BIOS recognises this drive both in the setup screen and just after POST when the PC searches for IDE devices I cant seem to get further than that.
It seems that outside of the initial reading of its basic drive information that the disk it doesnt want to play. It will not boot to an OS (this disk was split into at least two partitions if I remember correctly, and originally came from the National Physics laboratory, so was set up to either boot from the installed OS or from a Network. Also if I boot using a DOS start disk it seems that it will not appear as C: or any other.
As I have mentioned, this drive was also plugged up with my main system which has some FAT data recovery software installed and I thought I may be able to read the disk and check some stuff out. However plugging it up either as Primary slave or Secondary Master with this system results in my system not getting into the OS at all. I get as far as the MBR (Multi boot system Win98, Win2K and WinXP) select WinXP, the OS starts, then stalls with a deep blue black screen.
Odd.
During this time the Seagate drive continually makes quite a lot of noise, as if it is doing A LOT of reading or searching or something.
Any ideas?

 

[Multisync950]

I recently tried to do a similar thing. I pulled an XP hdd out of an older computer and plugged it into a newer one. I did exactly as you did, going from one box to another, but in my case I was getting a STOP error "Stop 0x0000007B".
I found an article addressing this error at

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;[LN];314082

I finally found another computer with enough similarities to boot the drive. I know you're not getting this error, but it gives you a direction in which to look. In regards to you not being able to read the drive as a slave, there are a lot of reasons why this could be happening. Unfortunately I don't have the expertise to help you with that one. Good luck!