Curse of the HDs...

I had a drive as a slave drive to stare my media (spme 2000+ pictures from my digital camera, and some 6000+ songs I'd aquired over the years), and it went out about 6 months ago. Well, luckily, I had another drive that had most of that data on it, and so I hooked it up and started using it. Well, a few weeks ago, the same thing hapened to this drive.

Neither drive makes any "bad" noises when plugged into computer (no grinding, screaming, or anything), and I can actually feel them spinning and it feels like they're booting... but when I turn my computer on with them plugged in, my computer starts to boot up, and gets past thos DOS screens that show the computer info, then the computer just restarts, and does the same thing, though this time it goes to the window that you can choose to start in safe mode, or normal mode, etc, and no matter what you pick, it just keeps doing the same thing...

For one of the drives, I got a new PCB board for it, thinknig that the electronics just got fried. swapped it out, and nothing. Any ideas to why this happened? I really don't want to lost all of the media, because it's taken me close to 7 years to build up.... I had had a back-up of it, but unforturnatly, when the main copy went out, I used the back-up, and never made a back-up of that one... so yea...

My dad thinks that it could be that whatever governs the power in the drive went out, so it brings the whole computer to it's knees and causes it to restart, but it's weird that 2 completly different drives (one's an 80GB Maxtor, and the other is a 160GB WD) would get the same problem...

Any ideas? Especially any ideas that don't involve paying close to a grand for a company to recover the data?

Oh, and a note, the WD drive is still under warrenty (3 year warrenty, and drive isn't even 2 years old yet..), so I'm going to send it to them and get the replacment.. I just want to see before I do that if there's anyway to save the data off of there, because they don't do DATA recovery...

First, Welcome aboard

That's definitely not normal behavior. I really haven't seen a bad HD cause reboots like that, and I agree its odd that two different drives (from different companies) would fail and act the same way. You mentioned the lack of a funny / bad noise. When I encounter bad drives they usually make abnormal sounds. So something else may be up.

My first thought is you should try testing each drive as the only IDE device connected to the PC. Take the 160GB WD for example. Start by downloading WD's data lifeguard tools from their website and create a bootable floppy disk (so download the floppy version of the tools). Set up the WD to be the only drive (which IIRC would involve removing the master/slave jumper) and connect it to your primary IDE channel. Unplug the IDE cable and power molex from all your other IDE drives, including any optical ones, so only the WD is connected. Power up the pc and see if the drive is recognized, and if the PC tries to boot off the drive. If that works it should find there is no OS and boot off the floppy. Then you can run diagnostics and see if the drive is good or bad, and if your data is there. Maxtor has similar tools you can use to test that drive via the same procedure.

Just from what you originally posted I think there's a chance your drives are OK. Possible reasons you're getting reboots like that include a bad or incorrect IDE cable or connector (i.e. 40 conductor when an 80 conductor is required), insufficient power, or it could be that your primary drive isn't playing nice and is causing the slaves to malfunction.

However, it's very odd that both drives worked fine for some time and then suddenly failed. So I don't want to get your hopes up too much, the drives could be dead players.

Well, I fixed it

I did the data lifeguard thing on the WD drive, and when I did the quick scan, it told me there was no errors. So I decided to do the full scan, and that takes about 45 min. Well, while I was waiting, I realized that there was one thing that I had always ment to try, and hadn't yet, and that was try a drive in another computer. so I commendeered my mom's computer, and hooked up the Maxtor drive to my mom's computer as a slave, and it booted right up, and I saw all my data and everything. Well, when the full scan finished on the WD, it still said there was no errors, and wouldn't boot up. So I plugged the Maxtor in, and it booted up fine. As soon as it booted up, I copied all of the data over to my main drive and then turned my computer off. Mainly because the Maxtor drive was starting to scream at me (I had forgotten that it was making some noise.. but I think that's because the drive didn't like the "freezer fix" that people talk about....)

So I'm guessing that something happened to the drive that caused it to not recognize my computer, or for my computer to not recognize it, and by plugging it into a computer that had never seen the drive before fixed it. Thanks for ya'lls help, and I'm sorry it turned out to be something that I should have tried a long time ago... Now as soon as my SATA cables come in, I can hook up my new 300GB HD, and have a back-up drive so I hopefully won't go through this again....