Hard drive gone weird

Alright here's one. I have a 80GB Western Digital EIDE and 120GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive. The way i had it setup is i had the SATA set as my primary drive which was partitioned in 2. First partition used for windows and programs, second for all my files and personal stuff whilst my other drive was left as it is and used for multimedia and games. Anyway a few days ago the computer just stoped responding so i restarted it but it didn't help. It would boot normally and then every time it would just about come to welcome screen it would just restart itself. Anyway I installed windows xp home on the second drive and menaged to copy stuff over from the second partition of the first drive so that's not a problem. The actual problem is that the first partition is not accessible and it's read as unknown. The drive isn't dead because I can hear it spining or so I beleive that it isn't dead anyway. What could have happened to cause this and is there a way to to access that first partition and copy some folders over or at least format it so i could return it to the store to exchange since it only about 6 month old. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

 

Try running a diagnostic check http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/ and if OK I suggest a thorough Virus check.

 

Some operating systems don't like it when they see two active partitions in the system. Installing Win XP to the second drive would have marked the primary partition on the second drive as active, just like the primary partition on the first drive. The second Win XP install may have hidden the other partition to avoid confusing itself.

If you have access to partitioning software such as Partition Magic, you may be able to unhide the hidden partition. If so, take care. Two active partitions on a system can be prejudicial to your data. Re-hide the first partition before you re-start the system -- and good luck to you if your system crashes before you can do that.

But once you have access to the first partition, you can re-format it, and you shouldn't have to hide it again.

If you can still access the second partition on the first drive, that drive is not dead.