PC won't POST with drive plugged in

[LintMan]

I'm in the midst of a nightmare of hardware failures. The most recent of which is that I can't get my PC to POST if my main hard disk is plugged in. It was working fine yesterday, and I've had it less than 2 months.

My hardware:
Western Digital Caviar Black 750GB SATA III HD (my original C drive, Win 7 installed)
ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe MB

New addition:
Samsung 830 256GB SSD (now with new Win 7 install)

The current state is that I can boot off the SSD if the WD drive is not plugged in, but if I plug in the WD drive, my PC will not complete the POST and I am unable to even enter the BIOS: I get the standard RAID BIOS message saying there's no RAID, (after which it usually goes to the regular BIOS POST screen identifying the SATA drives and whatnot), but here, the screen goes black and never comes back or does anything further. I can't even boot off a recovery CD or a disk diagnostic CD if the WD drive is plugged in.

So does anyone have any ideas what might be going on, or how I can try to recover anything from this disk? This drive is too new for it to have utterly failed like this. Also - does anyone know what the return period is for Amazon? It's probably too late for me, I suppose.

Thanks!

 

[janas19]

I'll get the ball rolling to help you out: when exactly did the problem start? Did you make any changes in your setup between the time it was working and the time it messed up, or was it just spontaneous?

 

[LintMan]

I'll get the ball rolling to help you out: when exactly did the problem start? Did you make any changes in your setup between the time it was working and the time it messed up, or was it just spontaneous?

Yes, nothing that should cause it to be so dead the PC can't POST. It's all been a mess, but I'm trying to keep it simple to prevent a wall of text detailing my entire saga.

Basically, I was moving files off the WD disk onto (what I now know was) a failing backup disk. I was moving rather than copying because I wanted to clear up space on the main drive because I thought if the data on it was small enough to fit on the SSD, I could do a drive clone and make the SSD bootable that way. (Turns out it will only clone if the entire disk (including empty space) to be copied is smaller than the target disk.)

After moving about 100GB of data, the computer started acting wonky and crashed. On reboot, after a painfully long time,it said it needed to run chkdsk on the backup drive. Chkdsk hung every time, but I could still boot into WD drive if I cancelled the chkdisk before it started (but then I couldn't access the data on the backup drive)

I found out about BootMed, a linux live cd designed to help recover data from failed disks, and gave that a shot. From there I was able to pull files off the backup and place them back on my main disk. So I did this and grabbed everything I just placed on there. Then I left if overnight to pull off everything else it could off the failing back drive.

In the morning, I discovered that not everything would fit on the main drive, so it had stopped the transfer. Still in BootMed, I checked the disk free amount, and it was at 0, so I went and deleted maybe around 16GB of stuff from the WD drive, and shut down. Then I unplugged the backup disk and tried to boot up: blackness. And ever since, I can't post with it plugged in.

So it went from working fine (in Windows, and then in BootMed) to utterly dead in one power cycle. I'd understand maybe a corrupt partition or something, but not total death like that.