Two IDE drives fried?

Question

I posted a question earlier but I don't think I was clear enough. This is causing me a huge headache. :-/

Here's the story:

An XP computer has 2 internal IDE drives (WD). The C drive has been formatted two weeks ago and has WinXP SP2 on it and is not partitioned. The second drive is smaller and is also not partitioned. One day this computer boots up and blue screens "Non-mountable boot volume".

So, I had enough of these old small drives anyway. I bought a new WD 160 GB IDE drive, and it is ready to go.

I have a second XP computer so I tried to slave these two smaller drives onto it (tried both forced-slave and Cable Select) - the BIOS sees the drives, Windows sees the drive and installs the drivers, but it doesn't show up in My Computer.

In Disk Management, BOTH of these smaller drives show up as 100% Unallocated (no partitions/no data) ?!?! They are both NTFS and both have data on them.

My initial thought is that both drives got fried in that old computer, or the motherboard malfunctioned and damaged them both since both drives have the exact same problem.

Incidently, the same computer I'm trying to slave them off of reads and mounts the "brand new" 160 GB with no trouble at all.

Answer 1

If you had both hard drives on the same idie cable, then it could have been the motherboard's idie malfunctioned, if you don't need the info, allocate the drives, and reformat, otherwise, maybe try using a program to see if you can get the info out. Partition magic may work, but more then likely you will need to use a software designed to restore wiped drives.