How could this have happened?

[Tk421x]

so i bought a 9800Pro last night, used it for about 3 hours or so, then all of a sudden my PS craps out and kills the power to the PC. PS is burned up, i could smell it right away. So i swing down to CompUSA today and pick up an interim PS for $20 til i can get an Antec or something.

Well, i get it installed and fire up the comp, but my Epox board is hanging on post code 75 (Detect IDE drives). It wont detect my 80gb WD slave drive (backup drive). I have about 10 gigs of data on there that i have collected for years and years (ripped my entire 200 cd collection) along with other odds and ends of things that i have picked up over the years (programs i liked, stuff i downloaded, etc). Basically stuff that i willl have a very difficult time replacing.

So i unplugged all my drives and boot with just my master HDD, boots fine. Plug in my cd rom and my burner, they work fine. Plug in my WD, wont boot. Tried every different config i can think of with no luck. Tried diff cables and everything.

Now if i boot the WD as the Secondary Master drive, it will detect on boot up but the computer stops loading at the Win2k screen for some reason.

Is there ANYTHING i can do to at least get my drive to boot so i can get some data off there? How the hellwould this have happened in the first place? How could NOTHING else have been damaged except this one drive???

:-/

 

[mechBgon]

If the WD is on its own IDE cable, set it to Single Drive on its jumper block (consult the label, this often means leaving the jumper cap off the block entirely). Recommendation: don't hang your system off of a cheap PSU for the interim without taking out the high-powered GPU.

 

[Tk421x]

If i set the WD on its own (i think i have tried that, not 100%) what difference will that make, just out of curiosity.

I already pulled the 9800Pro and stuck my old GF2 back in.

 

[mechBgon]

It's a known trait of the WDs that if you DO put them on their own cable and they're not jumpered as Single Drive, they may cause exactly the "stallout" symptom that you reported.

 

[Tk421x]

i still cant seem to get it running....unfortunately.

wont boot in my win98 machine either.....although, neither will my 20gb WD which works fine my win2k machine as a slave drive ....

i hate computers.