PC won't boot with my second hard drive plugged in.

[chris1554]

So I woke up the other morning and booted my pc up, it took ages on the windows logo screen which gave me alarms already as my OS is on my SSD. Once it did get past the logo I just had a black screen with a moveable mouse cursor, giving it 10minutes nothing happened so I tried a few more times and then booted up in safe mode and the same thing happened but after 10minutes the black screen stopped and I had my normal stuff start to load but VERY VERY slowly.

I tested some other things first but in the end my pc would only boot up normally with my Samsung f3 spinpoint 1tb unplugged. My os is on my SSD so I CAN use my pc without it plugged in 90% of my programs games etc are installed on the tb HD. It has about 80gb space left on it if thats of any concern. I tried multiple things from google last night but feel like I need some specific help regarding this issue now as it's still not working.

I tried to do a dskchk but when it got to "usn journal" about 95% in it said something along the lines of can't read j$ data stream.

In safe mode with the hd plugged in I can't access the e:drive which is the TB. It shows it there but doesn't say the space on it or anything and is un-openable. The HD is recognised on the bios and I'm really short on ideas at the moment. From google I have a few ideas at what the cause is.

The drive is dying.
A virus on something I installed the night before I wen't to bed and woke up with the issues, the only thing I can think of is the Darksouls fix that I downloaded. Apparently the virus affects permissions and causes this, but I don't see how I would of got it.
Data was written onto bad sectors, but I don't think it would cause the pc to act like this but who knows.

Any other ideas or things to test? As I have some data on the HD that I would really really rather not lose.

Regards

Chris

[vaeevictiss]

i believe your first assumptions were correct and you only posted here with the hopes that someone would tell you your drive is not fried and all info on it most likely not lost lol...it happens unfortunately.

[protput]

Try a different sata port maybe.

[chris1554]

i believe your first assumptions were correct and you only posted here with the hopes that someone would tell you your drive is not fried and all info on it most likely not lost lol...it happens unfortunately.

Pretty much

Try a different sata port maybe.

I have tried different power/sata cables and a different port.

[vaeevictiss]

i actually thought there was some device or program or something that had some backdoor way of pulling off any salvageable info...i may be thinking out my ass tho haha.

[ComputerNerd]

If you can get it to boot eventually, then try running Crystal Disk Info which will display the status of various built-in status checks.
Personally I use the CrystaL Disk Info Portable @ Portableapps.com version which you could run from a flash drive should you wish.

Could try a Linux Live Distribution of some sort, see if booting into that instead offers access to the drive.

[Theodon]

Still being able to see the drive is a small blessing at least. There's software out there for free that can salvage data from the drive, but it might take a while for a 1TB drive. I don't have any persona experience with the software so I won't recommend a potential lemon, but I'm sure someone on this forum is familair with the software packages available, and can give you an informed recommendation.

[ComputerNerd]

Run something like the application I previously described, or find some other way to at least check the SMART status of the drive if you can.
That should at least indicate if it is failing hardware issue.

IF that is the case, then back it up immediately.
Get yourself another drive of at least the same capacity, and maybe use a tool like the bootable Clonezilla disk to clone the drive.
Cloning though won't do anything for you if it proves to be a virus/malware issue.

[chris1554]

- I have no idea how to read crystaldisk, any help would be appreciated. I'm trying to work on retrieving data at the moment while my new hard drive is being delivered.

[Deleted]

Looks like a fried disk to me. You could remove the outer shell and check the PCB for damage. I have an old 200GB drive that causes a similar effect.