Hard drives have become un-initialized and un-readable!

Hi, this will be a bit of a ramble, but let me set the scene!

The harddrive in my computer has become sluggish over the last few weeks, and my computer has been behaving oddly, which i didnt really mind as i dont do anything useful with this computer. However, this morning when attempting to retrieve some uni files, my computer would repeatedly freeze when getting to desktop.

I took my harddrive down to the family computer and tried running the harddrive as a slave with that, and neither drive would load (checked jumper settings etc)

I then tried an old (and what i thought was broken) harddrive present in my computer and low and behold it still worked, silly me, all this for nothing!

Ive linked my knackered hard drive to my working one, and it hasnt corrupted it or anything, which was my first suspition with the family one.

When attached, both unreadable harddrives are listed in bios, and windows system tools, but independantly, they will not load their OS and ask for boot info early in the load process.

Is there any hope for either harddrive? the fact they both have the same problem at the same time seems too coincidental for it to be a mechanical problem.

Thanks in advance

 

Its a bit unclear which drive is which. Is it the family drive that is one of the unbootable drives now, after or as a result of hooking up the original unbootable drive as a slave? If so, are you sure you returned the jumpers and connections to thier original state and looked at the BIOS settings concerning the drive (detection and boot order)?

 

The family drive is unbootable now yes, and ive check all the connections and jumpers etc ( the family one doesnt need any in fact )

It seems that on both drives there is something missing stopping it booting up, although, when i fix a broken drive up to my working one, its as i say, unreadable.

 

Just ran seatools and the tests all say pass, but that doesnt get me any closer to accessing whats on them :S

 

I had a drive, once upon a time, it was going bad, only worked for a very short time until it heated up and stopped working again, but I hooked it up slave to a working system drive like you did and the bad drive corrupted the good drive, which I didn't know could happen. It was fine physically but would no longer boot to the OS.

I suspect you are in the same or similar boat, the drive is fine and SeaTools seems to verify that. You may just need to write a new master boot record to the drive or if you have an install disc and assuming this is XP, a repair install might help if some system files were clobbered. I might run some data file recovery software if needed before taking any stronger action like a check disk repair or if you just go ahead and recover any data needed and reinstall Windows.