Before I begin posting I just want to let everyone know I did back up everything beforehand so if it's dead it's dead.
All right after a "fun" series of events trying to restore an OS from an imaging program I tried changing the boot order of my disks. During one of the times I did this I noticed the power cable to my Sata 160 gig had problems on the connector tab, the end piece was breaking/not lining up and would make a VERY loud hum if I tried using both disks on my splitter. Fearing the worst I restricted the disks to the one good power connector (I get the feeling I"m using the wrong word) at a time. This worked for awhile until I wanted to restore my XP partition in the middle of the recovery it failed giving me a write error. I booted up Gparted using a LiveCD to clean up the partitions. Out of curiosity I tried to run the file system recovery thing not knowing what it does. After an hour it didn't complete so I went to bed. About 6 hours later it was STILL running and wouldn't let me stop it. Annoyed I powered off the computer and rebooted. This time I booted up Gparted and it only detected my external HD and nothing else. I rebooted waited for the BIOS to finish posting and was greeted with a I/o error given the last thing I saw in Gparted when the device worked was one unbootable partition ( a system recovery partition and the rest as unallocated space I wasn't too concerned but perhaps I should be? I can't set anything back up in gparted as it still will NOT detect the disk. Curiously going into the BIOS lets me see the disk and the information as to it's size, etc. That would make me THINK it's detecting it. But I digress.
I thought the last good power cable went bad but it detected the other larger 500 gig disk after giving me a slew of errors and forcing me to use last known good hardware configuration to boot it up.
Is the other 160 gig disk dead? I'm not sure if I can restore my OEM win xp without it. Thanks for any and all help/advice you can give.
All right after a "fun" series of events trying to restore an OS from an imaging program I tried changing the boot order of my disks. During one of the times I did this I noticed the power cable to my Sata 160 gig had problems on the connector tab, the end piece was breaking/not lining up and would make a VERY loud hum if I tried using both disks on my splitter. Fearing the worst I restricted the disks to the one good power connector (I get the feeling I"m using the wrong word) at a time. This worked for awhile until I wanted to restore my XP partition in the middle of the recovery it failed giving me a write error. I booted up Gparted using a LiveCD to clean up the partitions. Out of curiosity I tried to run the file system recovery thing not knowing what it does. After an hour it didn't complete so I went to bed. About 6 hours later it was STILL running and wouldn't let me stop it. Annoyed I powered off the computer and rebooted. This time I booted up Gparted and it only detected my external HD and nothing else. I rebooted waited for the BIOS to finish posting and was greeted with a I/o error given the last thing I saw in Gparted when the device worked was one unbootable partition ( a system recovery partition and the rest as unallocated space I wasn't too concerned but perhaps I should be? I can't set anything back up in gparted as it still will NOT detect the disk. Curiously going into the BIOS lets me see the disk and the information as to it's size, etc. That would make me THINK it's detecting it. But I digress.
I thought the last good power cable went bad but it detected the other larger 500 gig disk after giving me a slew of errors and forcing me to use last known good hardware configuration to boot it up.
Is the other 160 gig disk dead? I'm not sure if I can restore my OEM win xp without it. Thanks for any and all help/advice you can give.