Gavia

Alright I'll explain how the drives work. At first I had 2 160GB Western Digital HDDs (WD1600JB). That's been running smoothly for about 3 years. Lets call them WD1 and WD2. On WD1 there is (in this order) an XP intsallation, 5gb of unpartitioned space, a 50GB partition, my Vista installation and then 17gb of unpartitioned space. WD2 is one big partition which i keep all my backed up movies on. I installed vista not long ago onto WD1 and everything was fine, then I tried to install XP again to the 17gb of unpartitioned space (I forgot to create it in XP setup). Thats where the problems started. After testing a whole lot of things to get the bootloader working properly again for my initial Vista, I did something wrong and now whenever WD1 is connected to the computer (it doesn't matter whether it's a master or a slave) the BIOS just hangs. At the moment I'm using an old 20gb drive I found to host XP until I can get WD1 up and running again. So currently my setup is a Seagate 20GB HDD as Master and WD2 as slave. Both work fine.

Now to the drive setup. Every drive is IDE. The IDE cable connects to the motherboard, then connects to the slave, then to the master. In the WD1 and WD2 configuration, I had the jumper on WD1 set as [::I::] and the jumper on WD2 was set as [:::I:]. According to the picture on the top of the drive, that means that WD1 is set as Master and WD2 is set as slave.

I want to run diagnostics on the drive but I can't get past BIOS to let the CD launch and run them. I think that at some point of my tampering, I actually did something to the drive and it just can't launch properly. To tell you the truth, I just want to get my important files off it then I'm happy to wipe everything off it and start again or if needed to get a new HDD.