My Hard Drive Crashed !!!!! ?????

Q: I have a 500 gig Maxtor that keeps my pc from booting. It is the slave drive which makes it even more confusing since the pc doesn't boot from this drive. My pc keeps saying bootmgr is missing and won't boot into safe-mode or normally if the Maxtor is plugged in. When I unplug the Maxtor it allows the pc to boot into safe-mode only but it still requires me to boot into safe-mode. How can I fix the bootmgr issue? This Maxtor is the only drive I haven't backed up yet. I have tons of music and data files I would like to salvage and this includes hundreds of Jazz and Rock albums I ripped and I really want them badly. Any ideas? Thanks.

A: It sounds like you BIOS may be trying to boot from the 500GB drive first. If both drives are on the same IDE cable, check that the other drive is connected to the master plug (black) and that the 500Gb is connected to the grey plug. Also check the jumper switches on the drive. These can be found next to the power and IDE connectors on the drive. There should be a diagram on the drive itself to show you how to set the jumpers to "slave". Also check that the jumpers on the other drive are set to "master". Finally, when everything is connected, go into the BIOS at startup and check that the boot order is 1)Other HDD 2) 500Gb HDD. To get into the BIOS you need to look at the computer screen when it is first booting up. My Asus motherboard displays a "Press delete to enter setup" message. When you are in the BIOS, go to the screen which lets you specify boot order, then save and exit BIOS (usually with F10 key but follow instructions in the BIOS). That should do the trick. If it doesn't, then the only other thing would be to get an external HDD enclosure or IDE to USB adaptor and attempt to hook up the drive that way.

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