shottystoner

My old computer consisted of 2 hard drives. the first and primary drive for 2-3 years was the 200 gig hard drive. It was partitioned as 150/50 the 150 being for windows and programs and the second partition for data and files. The 80 gig second drive was giving me errors on bootup about 3-4 years ago, saying the drive was about to fail. I installed windows on the 200 gig hard drive and the 80 gig showed up. I figured all was okay, so I continued to run it being wary of the 80 gig. Eventually I accepted it and for about 1 and a half years I used the 80 for storage. My computer started to act funny, I used to use DVD's to backup my data. Such as game saves, maps and whatnot. A week or two before this computer failed the dvd's I was burning began to fail on after burning verification. I attempted to solve this by getting firmware upgrades for my drive, which created it's own trouble and didnt solve anything. Then, as I was playing Final Fantasy XI online one of my drives began to make sounds as though it was rebooting and trying to start up! I immediately began to shut down the pc and then I didnt use it till i got help from tech savy friends. I ended up having to buy a new PC and found out that the 80 gig drive seems to be dead but the 200 gig is working still. When I examined the 80 gig's PCB board I noticed a scorch mark through the foam right above a circuit.

Now, I have a new PC, it's got a 500 gig Maxtor hard drive, 2 gigs Gamerskill ram, an Nvidia Geforce 8600 GTS, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHZ each, a GA-965P-DS3 mobo, 2 Lite On drives including a DVD R, and a DVD R/W. Now I have a few problems. I would like to get the files off of my old 200 gig drive and am not sure if it's safe to plug it into my new PC as I don't want any further damage and as my friend explained, using parts that might have electrical problems could cause a problem with the new parts. Also, how likely is it that the 80 gig is recoverable? It never made clicking of death sounds, just started rebooting mid-game and from then on everytime it was booted it would just keep rebooting. I sent my old pc to a local pc specialist who SUCKED and told me that it was dead and blah blah and didnt fix anything. So I just want to know what are the chances I can recover the 80 gig Drive and also is it safe to plug in the 200 gig or should I wait until i have a definitive backup for it, as I want to make a ghost of that drive to preserve the files and system information. Also, one of the discs i burned on my old drive ( 1 disc so far that is out of a few ) is giving me errors when i try to move the files off of the disk, I get the error "cannot copy 'filename' the parameter is incorrect", after that I have gotten one other error which was a Cyclic Redundancy Check error. so how can I get the files off of this disc long enough to at least hold them or burn them to a new disc? Also, I have a feeling the LiteOn drives are just cheap and don't work well. The disc was burned as a multisession via Nero 6 I believe and I have Nero 7 essentials on my new pc. Also there seems to be VERY slow transfer rates of files from discs to my HDD and since it's SATA I was expecting faster speeds.

I really would LOVE some answers from people who are in the know, if you need anything to help you understand this, let me know. Sorry this was such a long post and I hope that I can get some help, thank you all.