Need help with HD

[jubalskeiki]

My main data HD is acting up. It all happened very suddenly. It hasn't been making noises, checking logs of my system monitor I don't see any temps over 40, ~37 seems to be the norm. It is a WD500YS. My motherboard is a Biostar Tforce550 rev2. I have a 65nm AM2 3600+. Everything was fine until two days ago when my computer just started getting really slow. I turned it off and rebooted...but it wouldn't load windows. I finally got windows to load by installing it on and old HD I had laying around. I then plugged my two other drives in (one the data drive which is SATA and one that was my OS and progs HD which is IDE) one at a time and the IDE one checked out fine. I can access all of my files and programs and everything, but the SATA one isn't being so kind. I am getting all kinds of errors. When I boot with it plugged in chkdsk runs and throws up 20 or so "file segment XXXXX is unreadable" errors. It then proceeds to boot normally and when I get into windows it will show up just fine. When I try to click on it or run any kind of file recovery it gives me a "error performing inpage operation" error. I have tried booting up to just dos and running a chkdsk /r when I do that it says that one or more unrecoverable errors were found. Does this mean my disk is just hosed? I am not too worried about the disk itself, but I have files on the disk that I don't have access to a back-up of anymore. The disk itself is still spinning up fine, and my computer is still seeing it fine, it just can't seem to do anything with it. Also, it shows up in my disk management, but it doesn't have a file system type (would that be why windows is registering it as a blank disk?). Another odd thing. I had accidently installed windows on it the very first thing when I got it thinking it was my other drive. I can get windows to start to boot...it doesn't throw up an error..it doesn't blue screen..it doesn't say it can't find the installation...it gets just past the boot screen...with the XP pro logo and just sits at a black screen endlessly. If anyone has any ideas I'd really appreciate it.

Also forgot to say...I have tested my RAM it seems to be fine. No errors came up. I ran it for about 5 or 6 passes. I also put the disk in another computer and had the same problems with chkdsk and trying to open the drive.

 

[jubalskeiki]

Update on this. I think I have figured out why the windows install will start to boot, but nothing else can see any of the files on the drive...this is my main data drive. I'd set it as the target for "my documents". So when XP made my profile private, it also encrypted that whole disk. I know that in the past when I've accidently deleted files off my main profile and slaved it in my profile folder would show empty until I changed ownership information and took control of the folder. I'll bet you that's what happened here. If I can't open the drive up to change the permissions, would a simple quick reformat clear those permissions and possibly allow me to restore the files or would that probably do more harm than good?