2nd hdd not working...

[Nevermore]

Greetings.

I have my windows installation on one hard disk, and another disk with my programs partition, and a 2nd partition on that disc for files/junk. I Defragged the programs partition yesterday with no problems. I began to defrag the files partition and the computer bluescreened and rebooted.

After the reboot, windows would not boot. It goes through the windows splash screen like usual, then the screen goes black when I would normally see the log-in window next, but it just stays black and nothing else happens. I tried to boot in diagnostic mode, safe mode, etc., no luck. Finally, I disconnected my 2nd drive and windows loads just fine.

If I boot the Windows XP Disc with my system drive hooked up, in either SATA port, I can launch recovery console just fine. If I try to do this with my programs/files drive hooked up, it hangs at "Examing disc....." for several minutes, then bluescreens and reboots.

Normally, I'd throw the drive away... but there is something on this drive which I quite foolishly did not back up elsewhere (or, I think I did but lost the backup disk).

So... any suggestions would still be very much welcomed and appreciated.

Thanks in Advance!

XP SP3
both are SATA hard drives using onboard controllers.
Motherboard: Asus a7n8x-e deluxe.

 

[KSoD]

Boot with the XP CD in and go into the recovery console. From there use the DOS interface and run chkdsk /r /f on the drive that is giving you issues.

This will run the check disk on the drive and check it for bad sectors and try to repair them. From what you said the machine crashed during the defrag and it could have possibly caused some corruption on the drive which will need to be fixed.

 

[Nevermore]

Thanks for the suggestion! I wish I could do that, but:

If I boot the Windows XP Disc with my system drive hooked up, in either SATA port, I can launch recovery console just fine. If I try to do this with my programs/files drive hooked up, it hangs at "Examing disc....." for several minutes, then bluescreens and reboots.

 

[KSoD]

Sorry i must have missed that in the original post. Do you know what the BSOD is? Maybe we can use that information to find out what is going on.

http://www.techist.com/forums/f9/decoding-stop-errors-193078/
http://www.techist.com/forums/f9/how-troubleshoot-specific-stop-errors-193301/

Those topics will be of interest on that subject. As for the problem. I would most definitely say that it is a problem with corruption of some kind. How to recover the disk without losing the data will be a trick.

 

[Nevermore]

Bah! Even testdisk can't read anything from the drive. The drive shows in bios with the correct size, etc., but that's it. Testdisk can't even read sector 0...

I connected it to a SATA to USB adapter and windows recognizes the USB device but will not assign a drive letter to it (like it does with a camera or jumpdrive) and doesn't show the drive in Disk Management (cameras/jumpdrives do show here). In Device Manager I can see the USB drive, but windows is unable to find any volume/partition info from the drive, it says "unreadable"

Furthermore, I'm positive that the drive spins up and it sounds fine at first. After leaving it spinning for a few minutes though, it starts making clicking noises.

Any conclusions, thoughts, advice?

Thanks again for your time.

 

[KSoD]

I would say that the drive is dead or heavily damaged. Any noise other than the spinning sound is bad for a hard drive. Could mean so much.

The clicking could be the read/write head bouncing off the platters. So you might be trying to raise a zombie drive. From your description the drive is done for.