Dell Dimension Hard Drive and CD Drive not recognized

[fakesounds]

I used to have a cd rom and a cd burner master/slaved to my motherboard. a while ago that ide slot died, so i master/slaved my hard drive and my burner to the working ide slot.

a few days ago the computer crashed. i dont remember the exacy error but it no longer recognized the hard drive. when i tried to restart it brought me to the strike f1 to reboot/strike f2 for options screen. i assumed this meant that the hard drive was toast, but upon further inspection when trying to change the boot sequence in the BIOS it recognized the floppy drive but the the hard drive nor the cd drive were recognized. this lead me to believe that the second ide slot had now gone bad as well.

my brother has another dell dimension so i opened his up, removed his hard drive and replaced it with the questionable hard drive. i booted it and got Boot Failure : System Halted.

is this enough evidence of a hard drive failure? ive come to terms with it being time for a new computer but im still hoping everything on the hard drive can be recovered.

any opinions/suggestions?

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Did you check that the Master/Slave jumpers were set correctly?
Moving a HD to another PC normally does NOT work, unless both PCs are identical in hardware. Put your 'old' HD as a slave in your brother's PC, boot up and see if you can access your old drive. Save whatever you can and burn onto CD/DVD.
Then go buy another PC, anything but Dell or eMachines!
Or better, if you have the know-how, build your own from components.

 

[jrad1966]

did you hear the hard drive click when you turned on the second pc? if so it should read as a slave providing you change the jumper on the first hd to master i agee custom built is the way 2 go if you wanna good steak start with a good cut of meat