Strange HDD Problem

[ObscureShape]

My computer has been running fine recently, until I went to boot it up this morning.. I had turned it off, shut down etc. completely properly and normally the night before.

However, it came up with the following error:

c:\windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe is missing and/or corrupt.

I googled this, tried all the fixes etc. i found and nothing worked.

So, I then got a spare hdd and installed windows on that, booted it up, installed all drivers etc. then tried running the previous hdd that came up with the error as a slave to retrieve a lot of important data i have on it.

When this disk is plugged in and set up properly as slave bios detects a hdd is there but doesnt know what its name is, spurting out random characters differing on each start up for its name. After this it gets to the 'to boot from a cd press any key ...' (the windows xp cd is still in the drive) prompt and stops there, doesnt budge any further and both hdd's spin very loud/fast.

Could anyone please help me with any ideas as to how I could get data off the previous hdd on to this new spare one.

 

[davidlem]

Could be a number of things. The simplest could be a failed/failing/loose IDE cable. The most complex could be failing/failed electronics on the drive's circuit board.

 

[ObscureShape]

Well I can now get it to detect what drive it is, but only when it is in the master position on the IDE cable.. Meaning it tries booting from it, which of course comes up with the same old error.