My money is on the jumpers

Thanks everyone, here's what I do know. The jumper settings on it are set to slave and I had it as my G drive when it was working last week, it was working fine till then. I know in the BIOS it finds it as slave also. When it was working we had it set to cable when it started acting up so I changed it. I will check the bios for the setting for the boot drive, I believe it is set to HDD-0 right now. Windows will load from my main drive with the backup connected it just doesn't stop. You can see stuff is loading but at the same time the backup drive is doing something so windows cant't get loaded all the way. When I timed it the other day after an hour and 24 minutes I shut it off and just unhooked the drive. My most important thing I want to do is get the data off it, I am gonna replace the drive, but I just don't want to lose the data. Will double check all the settings and let you know. Will take any other suggestions too. Thanks again.

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Ok, I did as yrag suggested and double checked the jumpers and Bios. The C drive is set to master, the backup to slave. I got it to boot once and was able to get a few files off of it, but then something crashed in the middle and it stop working. Tried to reboot but it wouldn't. Then disconnected the backup drive yet again, booted windows works fine. If that drive is connected windows does not want to boot. Talk about frustrating. > Just seems really weird to me, it was just fine up until a few days ago. Any other suggestions?

Something I didn't hear mentioned was the specific interface type on htese HD's. Assuming it's an IDE interface, there should have been a decision as to where on the interface ribbon each drive is plugged. I'm going to guess that the Master belongs on the end of the ribbon and the Slave should be connected on the middle. This may not be an issue since the original HD was probably on and stayed on the end of the ribbon.

Now, I might have this bassackwards, but that's an on-the-fly declaration of an issue you should have checked on.

Might sound silly but disconnect your cd-rom and set the back-up drive to master and put it on the second IDE cable....anything's worth a shot...if it comes up to vote, at least you can rule out the harddrive being the problem and retrieve your data. I am assuming that your running two IDE drives here

Yrag...just curious and no experience with it...I have the ability to use SATA on my motherboard, but nothing's wrong with my IDE HD's now. If you install two SATA drives and no other HD's, are they in a RAID array or is that just an optional way to configure them?

First, both of the hard drives I have are IDE. Second, here is how I have my drives set:

A Drive: Floppy
C Drive: Main hard drive
D Drive: CD-RW Drive
E Drive: DVD-Rom
F Drive: Zip Disk currently not plugged in
G Drive: Backup Hard Drive, the one that doesn't want to load.

Now, the stuff you mention to download, when I run it, I need to have both hard drives connected, correct? Or will it run with just the backup(seagate) drive connected. The reason I ask is want to make sure I do it right and don't want to take any chances messing up data on my good working drive. Sorry to seem do dense on this stuff but never had this happen before on a backup drive.

Thanks for all the time and help you are giving, I really appreciate it.

Essencay, yes i have tried setting it as just the only drive, as the master, have tried uplugging cd rom and everything in between it just doesn't like me enough to work. Which really stinks cause I know the data is there, the drive still works, it hasn't crapped out completely....yet. Just want to get the data before it does.

Thanks so much yrag. I will try this and see if it works. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed. It may be a day or two due due to some stuff I have to take care of, but will let you know what happens. I also think your right about nothing actually being wrong with the drive, just seems weird it has tried to boot with it connected. Either way the company is going to replace the drive after I get the files off it, so thats the good news.

Sorry it took so long to get back. Had to take a break before I took a hammer to this thing. So, here is what I tried. Downloaded and made the floppies from seagate''s site like you suggested. When you try to boot from them it says there are no system files on the floppies. Checked the floppies, it did make them, there are files on them. So, I got curious and tried the seagate cd I have, again. Then you get the this message:

''Please remove any cd''s or floppy disks
Hit ctrl+alt+delete to restart
X:\Install>

Then I tried running the seagate as the only hard drive in the system, just to see if it would boot to the cd, it wouldn''t, got the same error message. So, yesterday, I got the replacement drive that seagate had shipped me to use while I get the files off the other and am getting the same result with it. You plug it in as either slave or master by itself and won''t boot to cd either. Now I am wondering if my system just doesn''t like seagate drives. The one I have in the system now is a ''Western Digital'' and it works fine.
So, here was a thought. Is it possible the seagate drives connected with everything else on my motherboard is just drawing to much power, I have a 430watt Antec power supply. Was wondering if maybe I should try just leaving a few things connected? Other than these what else does windows have to have to run? "Both hard drives, ram and cd-rw" If that doesn''t work thought about trying to install windows on the backup drive to at least get access to the files, but didn''t know if doing that will hurt any of the stuff on it during the install. Didn''t want to chance doing that without asking first.

Think that is about everything I have tried up till now, if I forgot to mention anything, just ask. Thanks again for all the effort your giving me. Going to take a break from it till this afternoon, before I do use the hammer. Will check back here then.

The only thing I noted that was a little different other than fixing the ZipDrive lettering, was that the Seagate HDD is a slave to the DVD-Rom, if I''m reading his Drive lettering right? I think he has it HD/DVD - CD ROM/HD?

My motherboard has two IDE connections, there labeled IDE 1 and 2. The two hard drives are on IDE 1 and the cd-rw and dvd are on IDE 2. Disconnected the zip drive completely, still no luck. I am going to try unplugging the cd drives from the motherboard and put another new cable to the hard drives and see if that works. Maybe if the only things connected to associate to drive letters is the hard drives it will boot to windows. Because I agree that something seems to be getting in the way when it boots. If everything is booting fine without the seagate drive and only messing up when its connected, it does seem like something with it is causing confusion.

If that fails, am going to take the whole thing apart tonight and just connect only what is necessary to run, if it is confused about drive letters, maybe that will help. If that still a no go, I am going to take it over to a friends this weekend and try to connect to there system and see if it works. Maybe if I can get it to connect to a different machine I can copy the files. It is worth a shot a this point. Before I do any of this tonight, will check back and see if you guys have any suggestions. Thanks.
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I just noticed I should have added....when you get to the point where you put the new drive in, do as I stated and go into bios to make sure they show correctly, but then save, exit and boot using the floppies . Once there you can format the drive....now re-boot into Windows and follow the rest of the instructions as noted above......