problem with hard drive

[Reedimus]

I put in an old hard drive for some old stuff I had on it from a while ago and when I switched back to my current hard drive (IBM) I got a drive failure message when I booted. so I tried again and this time it got to the windows picture on it's way to loading windows and stayed there. I've rebooted a few times and it never gets past the windows booting picture. now I'm on my old hard drive wishing I would have backed up a few of the latest things I was working on and wondering if I'll ever see them again (especially all of my progress in various saved games . anyone have any ideas that might help? do you think my hard drive is dead or know how I might get it to boot? I'm on the old hard drive now and everything works fine, so I know it is the drive.

[dave computer]

Have you tried to make a startup disk and try to go to dos? If all else fails you could reformat it.

[jaga]

Are you just swapping the drives and only one is in at a time or did you add the old drive as a slave??

[Reedimus]

I messed with this thing for a while and could never figure out what was going on. I was trying to go back to my IBM as the solo master hard drive. I never wanted to reformat it because I still had some data on it that was not backed up. then I noticed a sale on the western digital 100gb special edition with the 8mb buffer and decided it was time for an upgade.

after I had the WD up and running I figured I ought to try to put the IBM as a slave to my WD. booted up on the WD and to my joy I was able to access the files on the IBM. still can't boot off it (the ibm), but I don't care anymore since now I have the data I needed and a new drive. maybe it was a corrupted boot sector?

thanks for the suggestions dave computer and jaga!

[jaga]

Just glad I can help I have been asking and getting alot of helpful info, but it is good to give some too!