Strange Hard Drive problem.. hangs computer at acpitabl.dat

[Konowl]

Ran into a strange problem yesterday that is frustrating the hell out of me.

I rebooted the server in my closet which has a Seagate 500 gb hard drive as it's pain drive as I installed the latested PS3 Media Server but it wasn't working properly. Upon reboot, Server 2003 wouldn't load whatsoever but would just hang. While booting into safe mode, the computer would stall at acpitabl.dat.

Whatever, time for an upgrade! I yanked the hard drive kept it aside and proceeded to install WHS onto the system. Works fine. As soon as I connect the old hard drive with Server 2003 on it, once again the system hangs at acpitabl.dat even though it's booting from the OHTER hard drive, the one with WHS on it.

This make no sense, I say. So I'll try to move it to another computer. SAME THING in that computer! As soon as I connect the hard drive, Windows XP won't boot but instead gets stuck while booting into safe mode (can't remember where it stops, io.sys or something liek that). As soon as I pull the hard drive, it works.

I have no idea what's going on, but I desperately need the files off this drive. Usinng some of the boot cd's out there, I can get a DOS prompt with NTSF support but it seems to be a bitch to copy from one NTSF drive to another. I can SEE everything...

1) What coudl hte hard drive possibly be doing to stop the OS loading when the OS is loading from another hard drive

2) What programs/boot cd's can I try to at least get the date off of there

 

[Shockey]

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ claim to have a GUI you can use with the livecd. Copying would be easier this way maybe.



EDIT: Got external hard drive you could put it in. Let your computer boot then connect.?

 

[Konowl]

No, unfortunately. It's an SATA drive and I only have an IDE external case. Might go pick up an external SATA case.... the data is worth the $40 LOL.