Two harddrives failed simultaneously

[crlf]

Hi. So I had three harddrives. One 13GB WD from 1999, a 60GB IBM from 2001 (both IDE), and a newer 640 GB WD SATA from December last year. I have a very outdated computer with an Asus P4B533-V so I had to use an SATA/IDE converter. Everything worked fine for 6 months until a couple days ago, when my computer froze for about a minute (when I wasn't even doing anything) and I could hear my harddrive(s) making noise and the HD indicator light was on. Maybe 30 minutes after that I went away for a bit and came back, and saw a black screen that said "Press any key to reboot". When I rebooted, I saw that my 13 gb and 60 gb's were not being regonized in bios. Since I had Windows installed on the 13 gb I couldn't load Windows. I tried using my Windows XP cd to reinstall Windows on my 640 gb but it kept telling me the drive was corrupt or not partitioned properly and that it was only aprox 131,000 MB. I found out the original Windows XP can't detect harddrives larger than 130gb~, so I've already burned a new XP cd with SP2 sideslipped in. Anyway, I bought a new 500 GB HD SATA to replace it, only to discover apparently you can't have two SATA drives on the same cable, so I'm currently sending it back and buying a new IDE. But my question is, could two harddrives just fail at the same time like that? I tried switching the IDE cables and trying them on different controllers, and even independently neither is being regonized by BIOS. I thought maybe it was the power supply, but everything else seems to work ok, including my two CD drives which were both plugged in (although not connected to any IDE controller).

 

[PhilFrisbie]

Did you try connecting your 13GB drive to your second IDE connection in place of the CD/DVD Drive? It might be a bad IDE controller.

 

[crlf]

I forgot to mention, I disconnected my 13 and 60, and put the 640 GB on the same cable on the same IDE controller and BIOS detects it.

 

[fzabkar]

Do your IDE drives still spin up?

Did you remember to re-jumper the slave drive as a master when you installed it on its own?

 

[crlf]

I do hear the old IDE drives spinning up. And I did set the slave to master.