Two hard drives reporting as 10 MB

[Sagekilla]

Okay.. so I have a pretty huge dilemma here right now. I had two perfect functioning 320 GB drives (One from Seagate, one from Western Digital) installed in my computer before. One stored all my movies, music, as well as the files for my web site. The other stored games and a few various other things. I also had a folder on one of the drives that I had dumped a bunch of stuff into to sort through later.

Yesterday, my computer was pretty much "dead" because (I think) I had a power connector for my video card fan plugged in close to my SATA connectors, practically on top of them. I simply moved the fan connector elsewhere, 7away from the SATA connectors which solved the problems I was having. Now, my computer boots and works perfectly fine, but only my old windows drive (C and my new one (D are working "normal." My two 320 GB drives are reporting as being 10 MB big.


I would like to also mention I attempted to boot into my windows XP disc and fix the boot loader seeing as I can only boot into my 160 GB SATA drive using a 30 GB IDE drive I have. I wanted to change it so I could boot using a newer 80 GB IDE drive I had and getting rid of that old 30 GB drive (Yes I have four hard drives if you've paid attention. I store A LOT of games and movies on this computer.) In the process, I had to guess a bit and try to pick the right drive to "fix" the boot loader on. I rebooted maybe three times, choosing (what I thought) was my D: drive, H: drive, and I: drive (the 160, 320 and 320 respectively)


None of that crap worked, my windows installation still only boots from the aging 30 GB deathstar and it seems like my two 320 GB drives have been nuked! Does anyone know what may have caused this? Or, for that matter, what could be done to fix this? I get the sneaking suspicion it was my meddling around inside the Windows XP disc, or possibly corruption from the power connector mentioned before. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.


Edit: I really need a free solution if possible.. Money is extremely tight right now and buying something is not possible at the moment. Also, I would not like to lose data from one hard drive to save the other..If it comes down to it I know which one I'd sacrifice to save the other, but I really would not like that to happen.

 

[g-paw]

I'd start by getting the free diagnostic/repair programs from WD and Seagate and run them off a Floppy. I'm confused about how many OSs you have installed. If you have have XP on the 160, disconnect all the other drves and see if it'll boot, if it doesn't run XP Repair. If the repair doesn't work, do a clean install of OS. Once you have the 160 up and running, install the other drives but make sure that only the 160 is shown in the BOOT Sequence of the BIOS along with the Floppy and Optical drive. Format any drives that have an OS on it. Make sure you back up any data on these drive because Formatting will wipe everything out.

 

[Sagekilla]

Okay.. Leme clarify a bit. BOTH windows XP installations I have, the one on the 160 GB WD and the one on the 30 GB Deathstar are in perfect working order. BUT, I have two 320 GB drives (A Seagate and a WD) that are being reported as only 10 MB big each. I've downloaded and burnt a copy of Hiren's Boot CD to see what I could do using that.

Also, I don't have a floppy drive in my system. I'm not really concerned with how my system boots right now, so much as recovering the data from the 320 GB drives. I have a lot of data on each that I need to get back. Some is irreplaceable.

 

[bc4]

I agree, download the diagnostic software from the respective companies

Probably best to do it one at a time,

You could always try them in a different system too (a friends that has SATA)

 

[Sagekilla]

Unfortunately, none of my friends have very modern system (no SATA) and none of them would let me touch their computers for that matter. And fact of the matter is... I have the most advanced computer in the household, all the other ones are pre-SATA.


I tried using the diagnostic software from WD and Seagate but to no avail. Both report sectors 2375 to <insert arbitary large number that represents the end of the hard drive> sectors as being damaged. I'm assuming this effectively makes my hard drives... dead, doesn't it? I've tried using most of the partitioning, hard drive, and recovery tools in Hiren's Boot CD but none of them have worked at all.


Guess I'm SOL, aren't I?

 

[g-paw]

In Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Disk Management, Right Click on the Drive, Properties, Tools and Click Error Checking and Repair if you haven't done so. If all else fails, there are companies that can probably recover your data but it would likely be costly