IDE Harddrive/DVD Rom Weirdness/Not Working

karwosts

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Mar 17, 2007
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The Short Version:
Secondary IDE Hard Drive stopped working when I plugged in DVD Rom. With both plugged in, neither work. DVD works when harddrive is unplugged. Harddrive does not work with DVD unplugged.

The Long Version:

Ive got a PC with one SATA main harddrive, and a secondary drive on an IDE ribbon shared with my DVD Rom. Both hard drives were working this morning. I tried to use the DVD drive, shortly realizing later that the power had come unplugged (I recently had it shipped cross-country). In what may have been a bad idea I replugged the cable in to the DVD while the computer was still running (could this have been a problem?). I then restarted the computer to find that Windows was now neither recognizing the DVD drive or the harddrive.

Both drives show fine in BIOS, but do not show up anywhere in windows (I checked device manager for the harddrive, its not there). If I unplug the harddrive from the computer, then the DVD rom reappears on a reboot, but no configurations can seem to bring the drive back to life.

I really have no good idea what could be the problem. If it was just the hard drive that wasn't working I would guess that it got shorted or something when I plugged in the DVD (they're on the same power ribbon), but the fact that its mere presence in the system seems to screw with the DVD rom leads me to suspect that it might be something on the motherboard?

If anyone's got any ideas to how to fix the situation, there's a fry's right down the road I can try to pick up some kind of adapter to see if I can get back into the harddrive (IDE to SATA adapter, IDE to USB adapter? maybe one of these will help). If I can't get back to the situation I had I might settle for trying to offload the data via some other adapter, but I'm not sure what to try. Any suggestions?
 

karwosts

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Mar 17, 2007
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Hard Drive is master, DVD is slave.

After messing around with it I was eventually able to get the data off of the harddrive by copying it to an external USB drive using partition copying software from a boot disk, so I'm pretty sure that the drive is not damaged as I was able to successfully copy all of the files off of it. Since I got the files off of it used Seagate Disc Wizard to do a reformat/reinstall of the drive, although its still not showing up in Windows.

Is there some super secret data sector of the drive that could possibly be holding some kind of corrupted boot data for the drive? Another thing that has made me suspicious is that when I was using Disc Wizard, my main working hard drive showed up under a tab called "motherboard controller", while the other drive was listed under a tab called "unknown controller". This could be just because the main one is SATA and the other is PATA, although I think that may have something to do with the problem.