Bad Hard Drive?

Having trouble getting my Windows XP machine to boot. Here's my problems:

- Got home today and my screen was black, system was running. I didn't
think much about it and restarted it.

- After restarting, I did a quick sync with my Palm, and then noticed a
serious problem: I have two hard drives in my computer, and my D:\ Drive
wasn't recognized.

- I tried restarting the computer, only to find that after the Windows
loading screen, I got nothing: a blank, black screen. When trying to
boot into Safe Mode, I get to an agp sys driver, and the system seems to
freeze.

- I disconnected the second hard drive, and the system booted up fine,
BUT I the hardware wizard came up saying that it had found new hardware,
a Multimedia Audio Controller.

I'm about to disconnect my system and try putting the apparently faulty
drive on a separate IDE channel, see if that does anything. But I
wanted to get some feedback here, too.

Thanks,
Kenneth

Kenneth wrote:
Having trouble getting my Windows XP machine to boot. Here's my problems:

- Got home today and my screen was black, system was running. I didn't
think much about it and restarted it.

- After restarting, I did a quick sync with my Palm, and then noticed a
serious problem: I have two hard drives in my computer, and my D:\ Drive
wasn't recognized.

- I tried restarting the computer, only to find that after the Windows
loading screen, I got nothing: a blank, black screen. When trying to
boot into Safe Mode, I get to an agp sys driver, and the system seems to
freeze.

- I disconnected the second hard drive, and the system booted up fine,
BUT I the hardware wizard came up saying that it had found new hardware,
a Multimedia Audio Controller.

I'm about to disconnect my system and try putting the apparently faulty
drive on a separate IDE channel, see if that does anything. But I
wanted to get some feedback here, too.

Thanks,
Kenneth

Swapping the hard drive around to a different IDE channel doesn't seem
to have worked... same result. I'm now thinking that the drive is dead,
so I'll move on to what recovery options for at least some of the data I
have. There's a great deal of valuable, irreplacable data on that
drive. I'm hopeful that I'd be able to recover at least some of it
considering that the drive still shows up fine in BIOS, and a disk
partioner still shows it and reports the proper amount of space on it.

Thanks,
Kenneth