Hard Drive won't boot and keeps another system from booting when Slaved

Have a Western Digital that stopped booting. It hangs at the Windows
XP spash screen, with the scroll bar running beneath it. When trying
to boot to safe mode, it hangs as it's loading .sys files from the
drivers folder (last one listed is amdagp.sys). I can see it in the
bios, and I've run a WD diagnostic tool and another one on it and they
say it's fine. I'm guessing the MBR might need fixing.

But the real problem is I put it in another system as a slave and it
keeps that one from booting up, too. Same problem with getting to safe
mode and a prompt, except that it hangs at agpcpq.sys.

Any thoughts, on at least being able to access it as a slave from a
prompt so I could try to repair it, or at least save the data? TIA!

Saw two like that this month. I could not do anything
about it. Lost a huge amount of engineering data on
one of the ... a SATA drive at that. Be interested in
following this thread. I did try to format it, and it simply
froze about 70 % through. Ran chkdsk from XP install
disk, and saw lots of bad places on the disk.

johns

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 20:14:43 -0800, "johns"
wrote:

Saw two like that this month. I could not do anything
about it. Lost a huge amount of engineering data on
one of the ... a SATA drive at that. Be interested in
following this thread. I did try to format it, and it simply
froze about 70 % through. Ran chkdsk from XP install
disk, and saw lots of bad places on the disk.

johns

Interesting. I found two other people via google with this problem.
One never followed up with the result, and the other was on Experts
Exchange, and the accepted answer, and apparent problem, was a dead
drive that he could RMA back. It also was WD, FWIW. I got some good
suggestions at alt.comp.hardware and so you may want to follow the
thread over there, as I'll respond to that thread with the results.
But I can't even get to a prompt to run chkdsk, so ours may be
different.