Multiple hard drive failures - desperate for advice

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steviep43

steviep43

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Jul 19, 2011
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Apologies for yet another post but I've got further problems with my hard drives and am struggling to find solutions and instead am making it worse. Quick story:

- 3 hard drives in my system, C,D,E
- C with Windows 7 failed to boot one day. Blinking cursor on black screen initially, then after a few reboots it just hung on the Windows splash screen
- used drive D to boot a 2nd copy of Windows, drive C not showing in Windows Explorer but is in disk management and BIOS
- used EaseUS data recovery to recover files from drive C to drive E
- EaseUS reported all files recovered, but over the top of the EaseUS message indicating this, Windows has 2 messages popped up saying that drive E needs to be formatted which is odd and completely unexpected
- reboot machine and drive E is now not showing up in Windows Explorer but is in disk management and BIOS
- D drive is now the only accessible drive

So I now have a situation where the data on both drives C and E is not accessible and I don't know what's going wrong. Could a faulty lead be to blame? When it first happened I swapped the SATA leads around so it's likely that drive E is now using drive C's lead but I can't be sure. I don't have enough hard drive space to do more data recovery, and I'm hoping that if the hard drives aren't corrupt that I don't need to do a data recovery, I just need them to be accessible again.

Any advice greatfully received as I'm now at a loose end

Thanks

Steve
 
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steviep43

steviep43

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Jul 19, 2011
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I've tried unplugging all the drives and getting C going on its own but it hangs at the Windows splash screen. Same in safe mode. How do I get it booting? With no drives all is as expected

 
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steviep43

steviep43

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Jul 19, 2011
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This was what I did in the first instance but had two problems - firstly I was worried doing that would lose all the data (I haven't backed up in almost a year, stupid mistake, so wanted to get the data from it first) but more importantly, when Windows asks which drive to install it on it wasn't listed, in fact no drives were listed. I then thought that something had corrupted the drive and it needed formatting before I could install Windows. Maybe I'll try doing it again

 
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steviep43

steviep43

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Jul 19, 2011
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Yep, POST is ok, one beep as expected, IBM bios. When I originally tried to reinstall Windows, the boot drive was the only one plugged in and visible in BIOS but wouldn't appear in Windows setup as a drive to install to. I'll try it again tonight to see if it now gives me that option. If it does, will reinstalling/repairing it retain my data?

I'm using a 100% ok copy of Windows 7, been fine for the past 2 years.
 
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steviep43

steviep43

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Jul 19, 2011
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It showed up this time on Windows install after a repair did nothing. But unfortunately a previous repair seemed to have wiped my previous copy of Windows as it only found a different, newer version (not sure how or where!) and didn't contain any of my files. I'm now doing a Recuva on the data to try and salvage what I can. I'm 99% sure it was a faulty power or SATA cable so have replaced both and so far so good.

Thanks for your help, just need to put aside a few hours trawling through all the salvaged files :/
 
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