Ok, I have a 40 gig IBM HD that was once my primary master from which XP was booting. It had two partitions. I got a new SATA and couldn't figure out how to get it working (i've done that now though). In the process I flashed the BIOS on the mobo to the latest rev. Once or twice after that the 40 gig still worked but then it crapped and wouldn't boot anymore. I ran the Hitatchi (IBM) disk fitness test from floppy and it said I had bad sectors. I told the DFT to erase those sectors and it said I still had bad sectors...fair enough. I tossed in a an old 6.4gig lappy drive (with an adapter) to get something to work off of and installed XP on it no problem. This is the point at which I figured out how to get the SATA drive working (as mentioned above). I put in a fourth (as yet unmentioned) IDE HD and transferred all of its data to the SATA drive and then I removed it (this is probably not at all relevant to the issue at hand but I mention it just in case). To recap...at this point there is the SATA drive and the little lappy as the primary master drive where XP lives. I then add the 40 gig drive as a slave. now i see the drive in bios, i get the windows boot screen, then i get a blank screen and i here the 40 gig drive grinding away (chug, chug, chug, chug) and nothing ever happens. I removed the SATA - same thing. I just tried it once more and got an endless XP boot screen instead of the blank screen with the grinding. And once more and we're back to the blank screen with grinding disk.
note: I'm now working off of a 120gig WD IDE drive instead of the old laptop drive for my boot drive (primary master).
The BIOS sees the drive and I'm figuring that the disk is still spinning up (otherwise the manufacturers disk utility wouldn't have worked). What is happening? I'm just curious if anyone has seen this and has an idea of what is going on and what the *appropriate* action would be.
My plan is to use FDISK to see if I can see anything with that. Next use Knoppix to see if I can see the drive (and anything on it) and if so copy everything to another drive if I can. Second shot is to use Runtime software (with which I have no experience).
The drive is in the freezer at the moment...can't hurt, right?
Hopefully enough system info pertinent to this issue is here:
-AN7
-1.4Ghz T-bird
-1x256Mb DDR (Samsung)
-ATI Rage Fury Pro
-Enermax 340W PSU
-Lite-On CD/DVD burner of some sort
-6.4 gig IBM travelstar as primary master IDE device
-XP pro booting from the drive above
-250 gig Hitachi SATA drive (non-RAID) on SATA1
-40 gig IBM Deskstar (the PROBLEM HERE) slave on either IDE primary or secondary
Thanks,
Mike