Detecting IDE Drives...

AnteCantelope

I turned my desktop on this morning, and it's just hanging on the startup screen, saying that it's detecting IDE drives. This is the stage immediately after it says that the memory is dual channel interleaved. It was working fine yesterday, I haven't been working it hard at all lately so I doubt it's overheated (it was pretty warm yesterday, but I was only running wmp). Anybody know what the problem might be? It's a bit old so I forget the exact specs, but roughly:
E8500 intel core 2 duo 3.16ghz
4gb ddr2 ram
1gb 4870
antec 900 case
2x 1tb hdds
vista home premium 64 bit
motherboard is a gigabyte, but I can't remember the name because it was a whole string of numbers and letters.

Any help woul be great, thanks

Killgrimage

You need to make sure that especially if you have a master and slave, that you have BOTH of them plugged in. If you have cable select, it couldn't hurt to assign one a master and one a slave. Couldn't hurt to load your default settings from the bios and/or clear it, either.

AnteCantelope

I can't seem to get into the bios, it just says it's going into bios and never gets there. I can't check that the cables are plugged in right now, but I've had this for a couple of years now so I doubt that could be the problem.

matt has a problem

Try disconnecting the drives, then booting and going into BIOS. If you can get into BIOS that way, chances are you have a drive that's gone bad.

AnteCantelope

Ok, so I disconnected both hdds, and it looks around then tells me to put the boot disc in the cd drive. Normal, I think?
I reconnect my second drive, same result. Again, I think that's normal.
I disconnect the second, plug in the primary drive, and I get the original problem.

I'm guessing that means my primary drive is dead, which is a massive bitch. Any way to tell for sure? I'm thinking now: disconnect both, put in a fresh hdd and install windows to it. Later, reconnect both original drives, see what can be salvaged. Would this probably be a good course? And how does one go about saving data from a dead hdd? Assuming it's fully dead, and hasn't just corrupted windows a little (which is possible, this drive has had minor deletion problems before which is why I installed the second one).

matt has a problem

If its just the windows install that's gone bad, installing Windows on a new drive, setting the boned drive to slave and booting from the new install would give you your best chance at recovering what's on it. If its fully dead, there is recovery software out there that has varying degrees of success. There are also companies that specialize in data recovery, but that can run from hundreds to thousands of dollars.