Need Help wi Hardrive Troubleshooting

[ctbrown]

I've been plagued by freezes and have traced it to one of my non-boot SATA II hardrives (SAMSUNG SpinPoint 250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive). So after some trouble shooting I have determined the following:

-With the drive installed the Win-XP takes forever to start and freezed shortly after starting.
-Physically disconecting the the drive restores normal booting and computer operation.
-Its not the cables, I'v already tried swapping these.
-The bios is able to detect the drive

So is this a hardware problem or has it somehow become corrupted? And, most importanty, can I recover the data without spending big $$.

Thanks

[shandro]

Try connect this HD to another computer as slave. If it can be showed, you may have a chance to recover the data.

[tuskenraider]

Is the controller your SATAII drive is on SATAII compatable? Otherwise you would want to jumper the hard drive to SATAI spec if it isn't.