Hard Drive trouble

[XilStorm]

Hi all, HD trouble, PLZ help!,

Plz bear with me on this one, lots of info I have here. Idk if there is a solution though....

I have been having some hard drive troubles. It all started when I was installing a new CPU fan, a ThermalTake, that I wanted to use to make the system quieter (I had to remove the motherboard to install).

Ok, some notes about this system (plz dont make fun of me, i know it is old )
---Pentium 4 proc, 2.8 GHz
---2 Hard drives, master is 36 Gb, the slave is 140 Gb.
---Windows XP, SP2
---DDR 400, 512 Mb RAM
---a standard CD/DVD drive
---500 Watt PSU (excessive, i know...)


So when I put my system all back together, I turned it on, all seemed well, BUT once the BIOS stuff ended, I got to this screen that gave me a couple booting options, for what reason, I don't know. The options were: safe mode, safe with networking, safe with cmd, last known good configuration, and start windows normally.

I chose last known good configuration, that usually works for my other computers. I got the pre-XP loading screen (a little black and white bar that always advances before the XP loading screen comes up). The bar goes across the screen, but then after that, nothing happens. the HD LED isn't on at all.

I made sure all of the connections were secure, several times, all seems well. I tried moving the HD to my other, better computer (see signature). It got to the XP loading screen then, but after a second, it said that XP had been "turned off" because of some flaw. It suggested me to reboot if that was the first time the screen came up. I did so. It kept giving me that Blue Screen, so I took out the HD and moved it back to my old computer.

I set the jumper of the master drive to “CS” (idk what that means), the system detected it, but the same thing happened, XP screen didn’t load. The HD was at least detected though. I then tried to reinstall Windows XP onto my 140 Gig.

Ok, when trying to install windows on the 140 Gig, all goes well until the “setup is starting Windows” part. It just stops doing anything, and the HD LED isn’t blinking. I will wait a while longer, but at this point I have no idea what to do. Could it be a realllly bad virus, or would this be more of a hardware issue?

Also, when loading into safe mode, the system stopped at "agp400.sys". What does that mean?

I tried two things: I booted from Knoppix (Linux, SUPPOSED to be CD-bootable) and BartPE. Neither of them worked. BartPE is hanging on the "Please wait" part, right after the similar black and white menu bar that I mentioned earlier. Does this mean that it is not only a hard drive problem?

[GDH]

What is your objective?

The reason that I ask you this is that you could be trouble shooting this problem for a very long time. Errors like this are hard to find and hard to fix.

If you only want the data on the drive then I would suggest that you start a Windows installation from scratch with a new clean HDD and see how far you get. Then you can connect your problem drives as secondary drives and try and get your data off.