Hard Drive Dead? Windows 7 Won't Boot

[RiZZo0]

Basically the setup I have is in my sig. My computer has been working just fine and I have even been running my setup with the 2 hard drives sitting on top of my computer case because I was tiding up some wires.

Now the only thing I can think of as to why my main 640GB with Windows 7 possibly stopped working is because we had a really bad thunderstorm over the weekend and I lost power 2 times while the computer was on. My computer luckily is plugged into a surge protector and even still my hard drive was working just fine. I didn't experience any problems until Monday when I tried to boot up my computer and all I got was a black screen with a blinking cursor. No matter how many times I reset the computer, that hard drive refused to boot up, and all I could notice was that the HDD activity light was constantly blinking but thats all. I also noticed that it is still recognized in the bios just fine and there aren't any weird noises coming from it so i don't THINK its dying yet.

Also just to be sure I wasn't crazy, I even tried swapping sata cables, power cables, and I even used the exact same power cable/sata cable setup that my hard drive was using and I plugged in a old raptor hard drive with vista and the computer boots up just fine so there are no problems with the rest of my setup. Lastly I used the Vista hard drive as my main, and the 640GB as my slave and would you believe the computer REFUSED to boot up at all! There is something really wrong with this hard drive to not even wanna boot up as a slave?!

Any ideas? Could the master boot record have gotten damaged somehow? On a side note I'm trying to borrow a windows 7 disk from a friend because I lost mines when we moved but maybe I could use some kind of utility to play with the hard drive?

I REALLY appreciate any help/advice you guys could give me in order to diagnose this hard drive ordeal!

 

[RiZZo0]

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[RiZZo0]

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[BinarySynapse]

I would say the drive or the filesystem on it is damaged in such a way that it's tying up the system trying to read it. Try booting from a linux live-cd (like Ubuntu) and see if you can browse the drive that way.

I've had to change the filesystem type on few drives just so I could boot Windows to salvage what was left of their contents.

 

[Old Hippie]

A surge protector does nothing for power interruptions/brown-outs and those quick starts and stops can be just as destructive as power surges.

A UPS is the only good solution.

That being said, your drive is obviously damaged but as long as it's seen in the BIOS or Device Manager it's probably OK but a reinstall would be in order.

You could try to repair it with a W7 install CD but I'd probably retrieve the data by connecting the drive via USB to a working computer and do a complete install.

Good Luck!