Greg, I went thru the same thing last year. My problems started differently but eventually ran into the same problems you are having. Mine turned out to be that the bios kept ignoring the SATA drive during boot up and kept going to the IDE even though I told it to boot from the SATA in the bios setup (the system wouldn't see the SATA. Turns out that for the particular motherboard I bought, the drives have to be the same type i.e. either all IDE or all SATA. It didn't say this on the box, in any of the docs or in the online info but I finally found a guy at the motherboard manufacturer tech support who told me that-it was done by design. The IDE was there to run the CD or DVD drives. That could be your problem but you have a different motherboard (& manufacturer) so it might not too. BTW, I didn't change my OS - stayed with XP.
So to finally recover the data, I ended up putting my drives in the wifey's computer (since she still had IDE and no problem with it trying to boot from my drive instead of hers) one at the time and burning everything to CD and transferring it to my machine by many many CDs, reinstalling from there. Took awhile but it worked and I was able to salvage most the stuff I needed off the old drives. Getting Sims2 running again is another story - you really don't want to know on that one. I didn't even think of the USB/external drive solution and hope it works for you. I miss Anja already.
BTW, I've really enjoyed your writing. You got me hooked big time with Anja. I just finished up with Happy Valley and Bonnyview Shores last week so I think I've finally caught up on the Happy Valley world. Thanks for sharing it with us all.
|