HDD Failure

[Crafty]

You could do what patio has suggested. I personally would buy another sata to be a slave drive. That way you wont get any hassel. Then once you have burn your files to disk you could then copy them to the new sata hard drive. Or you could try what what is written below.

First of all, make ure you have the IDE hard drive disconnected (don't have to really do this, but if having difficulties, it helps)

Then, go in to the bios setup menu and make sure your SAta is enabled in that area. (not raid sata)

While in the bios, go to the Boot section.

Make your boot order like this:

CDRom - 1st
Floppy - 2nd
Hard Drive - 3rd

Then, scroll on down in that same section to Hard Drives and make sure your Sata is set first in that area.

Then, make sure you have loaded Sata drivers from either the motherboard disk or even the drive manufacturer's disk.

Next, put the OS disk in and fire her up. At that time, look for the little prompt at the bottom of the screen that asks for either SCSI or other drivers and it says to tap F6. Tap F6 at that time and wait until it stops.

Then, put the floppy in and let it load those drivers. When done, remove the floppy and away it should go.

When it is done loading the OS, then hook up your IDE hard drive and repeat the bios setup area about hard drives to make sure the Sata is listed first, because most board default to the IDE drive. Be sure to save when you exit....and everything should be wonderful....well, I hope anyway.

[patio]

Remove that drive from your machine.
Set the jumper as slave following Seagates guide on the drive.
Hook it up in a working machine to the middle IDE connector on the other machine.
Boot up and retrieve your data and burn what you need to CD/DVD.

Since Windows was not uninstalled properly this drive is going to continue to have issues untill it is properly formatted which erases all data.

Best of Luck.

Do this step first...

[sera]

An update on the problem. I bit the bullet and took the machine in my local shop, the guy there suggested that because I had manually deleted the program files from the IDE drive that this was the source of my problem. As well, there were still Windows files on this drive (which I had being unable to delete) and I think the computer was confused by this.

Anyway, he suggested transferring the files (from the drive) to another drive, format the drive and then put the media files back on the drive. Hopefully - when he tells me its done - we'll be back iin business.

I really appreciate all your help, Crafty and Patio, and think that this forum does a great community service.

Cheers

sera