dual boot windows xp - can't access drive after a failed format

[Margaret Simpson]

I have 2 Maxtor drives attached to a Maxtor ATA 133 controller card. One is
a master and the other a slave. The master drive is split into 3
partitions, drives C, D and E. C and E both have Windows XP Pro on them. I
use the copy on drive C for business, and the one on E is for my son and
grandson to play games. I have found in the past that games eventually
'mess up' computers, so this seemed to be an ideal answer. All was working
well, until my son said he was having a lot of problems with the games side.
I tried to do a system restore, but it kept saying nothing had been
restored. I then tried a repair. Even though the controller card was
acknowledging that it had a drive connected to it, I got an error message
saying Windows
couldn't find any hard drives. I moved the connection from
the controller card onto the IDE. Then windows found the drives and did the
repair to drive E, but it made no difference. I then reinstalled Windows
over the original copy on E, but it was still the same. Even the users were
still
there. So I decided to reformat the drive and start afresh. The reformat
was nearly
at the end, when it failed. Now I can't boot drive C: If I boot it
connected to the controller card, it says 'DISK BOOT FAILURE. Insert system
disk and press enter. If I try to do a setup from the CD while the disk is
on the controller card, it says 'Windows did not find any hard disk drives
installed in your computer. Make sure hard disks are powered on and
properly connected to your computer and that any disk related hardware
configuration is correct'.
If I boot it from the main IDE, it stops at 'IDE BUS MASTER ENABLED'

Please can someone help me? I have so much stuff on drive c: Obviously I
have backed up the most important files, but it is such a large hard drive
that there is a lot of stuff I couldn't back up.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Margaret
Royal Leamington Spa
UK

 

[Frank]

It sound like maybe your ATA controller card may be going on you.
You might try doing a master boot record fix by going into dos and typing
fdisk /mbr to see if you can boot up from the ATA controller card. If not
move it over to the IDE controller and try another fdisk /mbr.
If this doesn't work you might even try taking the ATA controller out of its
slot and trying to boot from the IDE controller again.

 

[peter]

You could try to restore the drive with powerMax, a
harddisk utility from maxtor. It's available at their
site.

 

[Margaret Simpson]

Unfortunately, Powermax can't see the drive either. It is strange because
the disk controller acknowledges that it is there.

Margaret