Hard Drive suddenly not detected (dual master slav

[bax5]

Hello.
I have been running my computer fine for over a year, then suddenly, after turning on the computer, the boot sequence shows that the primary master and slave drive cannot be found.
This is what i have set up:
Two 120GB WD IDE hard drives, one on primary master, one on primary slave. The master has all my windows files and program files. The slave is STRICTLY data, only music, videos pictures etc. I also have 2 cd rom drives connected to secondary master and slave.
I am running a pentium 4 1.7ghz
windows xp home
768mb ram

What i have done so far:
I have tried replacing ide ribbon cables to brand new ones, no help.
I went through the bios and made sure everything was on auto detect.
In the bios, when on the selection for primary master or slave, it cannot detect the hard drives either.

What i have been able to do is: Since one of the hard drives is used to store windows programs etc, and the other is used ONLY for data.
If i set the windows hard drive to master i am able to boot up normally and everything is fine except that i'm missing my second hard drive and all the data on it since its not plugged in. If i try the reverse, and just plug in the "data" hard drive, same thing happens, cannot detect hard drive.

I hope i have given enough information for help, thanks everyone!

[GX1_Man]

There may be a problem with the IDE channel onthe motherboard or the hard drive has problems.

I would try to slave the secondary hard drive into another machine and see if it functional there, as it may be the one with a problem.

[bax5]

I tried the secondary drive on another machine, it seems like it is the problem, for the second machine did not start up as well. Does anyone know why this may have happened? and is there a way to fix the hard drive? some of the data is important but i have most of it backed up whcih is ok. Warranty on the hd has run out too.

[GX1_Man]

All hard drives die eventually. It may have been time for this one to expire. THere is a reason they have time limited warranties.

Data recovery is very expen$ive, so you may or may not want to do that. Is the drive recognized correctly in the BIOS? Did you try it in the other machine with a different IDE cable?

A long shot would be to put it as the ONLY drive in a machine, jumper it as Master, and see if the data can be tretrieved with a Linux Live CD.

http://www.computerhope.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?num=1152393515

Software does not fix defective hardware however.

[bax5]

i have tried running it as a master drive, it did not work, but this may also be because there is nothing on it except data files (mp3s pictures) its only been 2 years? is that how long a hard drive is supposed to last? seems short.... i've had may hard drives last longer than that. as for the linux way... i dont have the time to go through that lol, its ok we already replaced it with a 250gb hd now so it is all good, just gotta get back some data

[GX1_Man]

Well good luck with your effort.