Greetings!
I have the following problem. Recently when I used my computer it came to a sudden stop and the screen (including the mouse) freezed. I was at this time running a program which wrote alot to my master harddrive. I have two drives installed, one master and one slave.
When I rebooted the system, Windows refused to load. I couldn't boot in safe mode either, the loading just came to a stop some seconds after displaying the Windows loading screen.
I took the drive to another computer and mounted it as slave drive. When I checked the drive from Windows it said that the drive was empty. Using the emminent program GetDataBack I could get the bulk of the files back though.
Now for the strange thing. When I looked at the drives from the partition handler in Windows XPs installation program immidiately after the crash BOTH drives appeared to be empty. Now I have removed the drive that was written to during the failure and have changed so that the other (which was not written to during the crash and thus should have remained unaffected) now is master drive. I have tried to install a few different Windows XP versions as well as Windows 2K (with CDs I know work), but every install has failed. I always get through to copying the installation files, but then after the installation program has reboot itself, different strange errors occurs and the system halts. For instance, one particular attempt stopped at the "Vefitying DMI pool data" message and another one said something about something unexpected with the kernel. I have tried to reformat the drive (both the quick and slow way) several times.
Is it possible for two harddrives to crash like this at the same time, I mean I just wrote to one of the drives. My first thought when I saw that both drives were empty was that a harddrive controller or some other component at my motherboard had failed so that the communication between the drives and the computer didn't work out. This somewhat contradicts the fact that the drive that caused the failure indeed appeared empty when I took it to another computer...
So does anyone have any clues/suggestions what might be happening here? Is it possible for the computer to send a shock wave killing two drives at the same time (it almost seems like that in this case hehe)...
Cheers and thanks!
/elias
Linear Mode
