Hard Drive is Failing...Help Please!!

[DLzone]

My friend just brought over his computer so he could transfer over some mp3's from one of my hard drives. The problem I'm having is I accidentally gave him my primary hd, not my secondary that has all the mp3's. So when we turned on his computer it booted of my hard drive which has win98 (he has windows 2000). We imediately realized it and switched hard drives but now during the boot up it freezes every time after the post and displays two c's that have little tails (bad description, I know). My hard drives are both Maxtors. The primary is a 15 gig the secondary a 60 gig. His primary is an IBM 120gb Deskstar. Is it possible that my hard drive messed up his just by plugging it in? I've done this before with another computer and nothing happened. Please resond and comments/questions would be appreciated.

 

[DLzone]

One more thing, Is there anyway we can solve this problem without reformatting???

 

[Thraxen]

Have you tried simply re-installing Windows? Set your BIOS to boot off the CD drive first and then start up your PC with the Windows disc in the drive. I'm not an expert at all, but I recently went through this problem with my sister's PC. Her PC suddenly stopped booting up (it wouldn't even boot in Safe Mode) so I attached it to my PC at a slave drive and did some error checks and virus scans. I found 400+ files infected with viruses (she didn't have a virus scanner...she does now). I cleaned those up and then booted off the Windows CD and re-installed. Now if works perfectly and she didn't lose any of her files.