I’d say use fresh HD, and fresh copy of XP… try a new CD drive, and a new Cable. Also Make the drives master and salve… fuck cable select… because it fucks things up sometimes.
I have an external Firewire case that I can use to help you back up your important data if it comes down to that.
all i can think of is either both drives are bad or you need a better power supply.
or… small chance it might be the motherboard.
bad ram wouldn’t keep you from copying files/installing.
send me the drive if you want the data back.
good luck
Ordered new drives for a RAID setup, we’ll see what happens when they get here. I tried the bad 250g in another computer and it could read the large storage partition fine, but the system partition was fubar’d. Might be able to get the data afterall.
what do you use? i’ve tried all sorts of partition and drive software. i even bought spinrite and i still can’t get any data or a valid ntfs partition to come up. it mounts in windows, i just can’t read it.
sounds like a bad IDE/SATA controller.