[Solved] WindowsXP will not boot when I put 2nd sata in

I have a WD 500GB external SATA hard drive that stopped working last week. I thought it might be the power so I tried a different power cord and it started working again for that night. The next day not working again. changing power cord did not work again. It would make the noise like the doorbell noise like the CPU found a new usb device then it was taken out. It would keep doing this over and over until I unplugged the drive.

So I took it out the case and hooked it up to a SATA cable in my CPU. When I do this I get all the way to the Windows screen and the computer hangs after that. If I check my BIOS it recognizes the drive but I cannot boot with the drive hooked up. So I decided to try a hot swap. I started my PC without the drive in and it went into windows. While in windows I hooked up the drive to the SATA cable and power. The little bubble came up in windows saying "WD 500 blah blah found". However when I go to "My Computer" the drive does not show up, and about 5 mins after I hot swap the drive in windows starts to become unstable and then freezes, I have hold the power button to shut the PC off. I need to find a way to get that info off that drive.

I have a lot of important stuff on there, and any information & help you all can give me would be greatly appreciated..


thank you

Does it show up in Disk Management and let you assign a drive letter?

I believe that Roli is correct: A data ecovery specialist will need to be used.
I'm not familiar with any, but maybe someone else on here is.

You can try sticking it in the freezer for a bit as that will sometimes get it to work long enough to pull data off of it. If the data is totally important and worth the money spent on the Data recovery, then don't stick it in the freezer.

I have a relative who is a manager at a Best Buy, so I am going to ship it to them and see if one of the geek squad crew can revive my data for me. So I'm going to keep my fingers crossed.

thanks for all the responses everyone!!

Best answer selected by gargamel301.