"corrupt or unreadable" disk drive

[tizerist]

Afternoon all.
Something strange happened yesterday, which i cannot figure out.

I have 3 disk drives, 2 150 gb drives and a 75 gb drive, and they all show up on the start > computer window. Until yesterday.

The 3rd (smaller) drive suddenly showed up as "corrupt or unreadable" and would not let me access it. as if that wasnt bad enough, my DVD drive then went and done exactly the same thing, for no reason whatsoever.

First things first then: The DVD drive. I went to google and found a technique where you go into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and changed the registrys. This bit has been sorted.

Back to the 75 gb disk drive: it now wont show up on the start > computer window at all. Even on the F8 boot menu it wont show up. The only way it will show up is if I insert my Vista disc in, and then it will show up on the first screen or two of the installation process.

This has meant that the GetDataBack program cant even find the faulty drive in order to carry these unreadable files over to, say, hard disk no.2.
Only the Vista installation agknowledges it as being connected.

Assuming that the DVD drive bit should be quite straightforward at this point, it leaves me with just the problem of the disk drive.

How can I access these files, and drag them over to another drive with the view of reformatting the thing afterwards?

And will this happen again? is this 75 gb drive reliable enough?

Hope you can help. Thanks.

 

[tizerist]

this post is no longer applicable. look below

 

[tizerist]

okay, the computer finally recognised the drive, and after booting my computer up with all 3 drives intact, it took like 20 minutes to go past the microsoft loading bar, then ran a check disk by itself.

now transferring data to drive no.2.

so, in order to keep my data safe in future, would a FULL disk check (the mandatory one was pretty quick) solve this problem?
should I instead format the drive then move the data back across?
Is this drive even reliable enough?
Whats the chances of this happening again?

EDIT: the faulty drive was the master drive according to the boot menu. I don't want it to be. Its best to have the master as the one with the OS on it, is that right?

Is there a way to change this designation without using tweezers and such (one webpage has suggested a tweezers method)?