Recovering a Corrupted Hard Drive

[VilleDick]

Hi, 1st post, I recently got a new computer and figured I'd get adventurous. I pulled the hard drive out of the old one, installed it, and tried to put Fedora Core 2 on it. With Windows XP running on the first drive. Simple right? Well, Fedora Core 2 stinks and has known bugs, it appears my install about 1/2 completed. When I have both hard drives connected the computer is non responsive and will not boot. When just the windows drive is connected it's fine. I would like to recover my other drive and would like to set Linux up on it. One thought I had would be to plug the second (corrupted) drive in while the PC was running and see if Windows will recognize it so I can format it. Don't know if that's a good idea though. Does anybody have ideas on how to recover this second drive??? Thanks.

 

[VilleDick]

And as a side note when the corrupted drive is plugged in I cannot boot off of anything, CD, floppy, nothing. So my boot record appears to be about half written on the bad drive basically handcuffing me from accessing that drive.

 

[AWS]

The only thing I can think of that you could try is to download a copy of western digital tools, they work for all drives and not just WD drives, and use the low level format utility to format the drive.
Download the utility, disconnect the working XP drive, connect the non-working drive as master, put the WD tools disk in the floppy and boot to floppy to format. You might have to go into bios and set boot order to floppy, cdrom and hard drive in that order.

 

[VilleDick]

I'll give that a shot, it could be tough though because I don't believe the bios even loads right with the other drive connected thus causing me not to be able to boot off of anything. Something might be messed up with the boot sector and I can't figure out why. I'll take a look for those tools though

 

[phreakwars]

If the BIOS is taking forever to load with the other drive, then RECHECK your jumpers for Master/Slave
.
.

 

[VilleDick]

The jumpers are fine, I'm 100% positive of that. The bad drive is configured as a slave with the good drive as a master. I have no clue why I can't boot off of anything. That's all I need to do and then I can (hopefully) blast the second drive. Unfortunately I can't diagnose or troubleshoot anything unless I can actually boot off of something and recognize the second drive. When I installed FC2 I had to fix the boot record on the master (good) drive with the XP disk. That's the only way I could even get that one to boot up. That may have hosed me from ever getting the second drive to boot.