Maximum PC

Was watching video off my D drive and system shut down abruptly. I have an SSD C drive for my OS and 4 other drives that are just slaves. My system won't boot up unless the D drive is unplugged, it just hangs on Win7 splash screen.

Got a lot of media on this D drive but can't get onto it. Any ideas?

See if you can boot in safe mode. If you can get into safe mode and the D: drive is inaccessible or made RAW, TestDisk could help you recover the partition or files. Otherwise, you would have to find someway to externally mount the drive, or if your drive is SATA and your controller is set up for AHCI mode, then you can plug the drive back in once Windows boots up.

It is SATA and it is AHCI. You mean I can plug it in right now and Windows should recognize it? Like I said I'm on the pc right now only cause the D drive was unplugged.

Just plugged D drive back in, no go and I know the electric connection is good cause I use it when I want to run the DVD drive.

The fact that your HDD is preventing your system from booting...turn off all power saving when drive is disconnected and install a rapid image backup app like Macrium Reflect free, make sure it is ready to go...reconnect and boot up let sit for up to a couple of hours...sometimes it comes up slowly, if so quickly make an image. Repeat a few times as it is hit or miss.

Does the drive show up in BIOS?

Boot up a test app like Seatools for DOS (if you can) and test the HDD.

Swap with a known working data cable and power connector.

Try recovery apps. Probably won't work if you can't boot.

Can try to boot from Linux recovery disk called SystemRescueCD. Superbly powerful. If it will, then use ddrescue to first copy what is undamaged using the -n and a log file and then redo with a try to recover damaged files -r3 and the same log file name (it looks in the log file and skips any files it was already able to recover). I will see if I can locate a script because Linux command line is definitely a bit of a WTF at first.

If one of the drives is an exact match (including firmware version) you can back up the working drive and swap its board onto the nonworking HDD to see if it is a failure on the board responsible and recover data.

Recovery $ervice$ can almost certainly retrieve your data.

WOW....thanks for laying out the knowledge!

Yes, it certainly does show up in BIOS and Windows TRIES to start but hangs on the splash screen.

Before, I couldn't straight away boot to C drive, even with D drive unplugged. I had to make it boot to the DVD with a DVD in it, have it ask me to hit any button to continue to boot to DVD then NOT hit a button and it would boot to C drive fine but only this way. Boot to DVD and NO D drive plugged in.

So while in Windows I reinstalled Win7 thinking the problem was a boot sector on the C drive, now I know it's not.

I got lucky in one regard, the other drives have $1000's of media in HD on it but the D drive has mostly older, nonHD shows on it.

Forgot to mention........after reinstalling Win7 to the C drive I can now boot directly to the C drive without booting to the DVD first.

So I think I messed up boot sectors on both C and D drives. Fixed the boot sectors on the C but still obviously have problems on the D drive.

Just need a little help in what to do first.

I was watching media from the D drive which of course includes the use of the C drive. The C drive is the only drive with an OS and runs all programs, all 4 other drives are strickly slaves.

So when I accidentally ended explorer.exe I believe I messed up the boot sector on both drives. By reformatting the C drive I can now boot directly to it without having to first try to boot the DVD. Just don't know how to begin to get to my D drive as I said it has no OS. Thanks.

So from Windows Explorer you cannot see the D drive or the contents of the D drive?

Correct. BIOS does recognize it, Windows does not.

Not good. I would go into Windows Disk Management and get what information Windows has on the drive, how it sees it. DO NOTHING other than look. Any actions can destroy data. Let us know.

edit: Nevermind, I just reread your failed D drive prevents you from booting up. This pretty much means you can try to boot up Linux to see if it will boot up and if it can see/read/test/repair the drive. I'll think about this a bit.

Depends upon what Windows sees but I suspect you have a hardware failure and you will have to boot up a Linux recovery system and try to pull whatever you can off the drive.

Did you try TestDisk that LatiosXT has linked? I was going to play with that this PM just to see what it can do.