Quote Originally Posted by confus-ed
Well its not a procedure for the very feint of heart, but neither is it rocket science to actually do it - what you must get though is matched drives & you can only change the controller card bit simply - if that's what you mean as 'internals' ? - but I think you mean platters & spindles from inside it ? - you can try but I think you'll just 'kill it good'. (like I realise Geoscomp just put while I was typing)

You've tried slaving it in another machine ? Swapped cables ? - any message at all or just 'stuck' ? Since it won't power up sometimes you've also checked cabling to & from psu ?

Lots of stuff as well so don't panic yet could yet be more things to try like the freezer trick in case its a stuck spindle etc..

Tell us what you've tried so far to cut down on duplicates & questions
How it happen (as I was told...) the drive was the master in a Gateway system, the drive built in late '98 and it had WIN98 SE on it. Into a new system (home built with XP Home OEM) as a secondary master. They wanted to just pull off the data and put it on the new WD Raptor 36GB SATA... The HDD was seen in the BIOS but by the time XP came up, it was dead!

Here is where I came in, I removed the SATA, CDR and DVDR (primaster master & slave) and tried to boot into WIN98 via the primary & secondary master. At first the drive would not even power up. It was out of the case and after the third try I placed the drive on the desk (I was holding it) and all of a sudden I heard it start up. This time the BIOS would recognize the drive (auto detect) but would hang there. Off and on it would recognize in either IDE port but never go beyond that.

One thing I did notice is after the BIOS recognize the drive, it would then shut down... So I took it to my house where I have a external drive and tried to run it on my secondary master. So far it has not been detected by the BIOS.

Since then I have been sitting on it watching a few eBay auctions... one will close out today for a drive that is only .99 and I figure I could buy a couple to learn what to do then attempt the swap.

WHEW! Sorry so long! I saw your post and Geo's about swaping the board, I never thought about that so if that is what I should do I'll try that... I have no idea what I should start with that is why I'm turning to the pro's here...

Learn me oh great ones!