So, I was sitting there last night, puzzling over why a hard drive will work fine in one computer but not in another.
I went through it again and again because something didn't quite add up. I take the hard drive, plug it in HERE and it works fine. I unplug it, take it over THERE, plug it back in and it doesn't mount up. WHY?
I plug it in here...plug it in there....what's different? Where's the item out of place? I plug it in here...um...no, it couldn't be THAT. could it?
Yes, it could. When I swap the drive, I also swap data cables to avoid having to pull out the computer from it's little cubby each time. Yep. The brand new data cable was bad out of the box. When I also swapped the data cables, the drive mounted right up and I could access all my data.
<facepalm moment>
How did I not see that all along? Oh well, live and learn. On to the next issue, which is a relatively simple hardware issue.
My Windows D: drive sometimes disappears after a few hours of service and remains totally invisible to Windows until the next reboot.
Also, the A: drive is dead.
Also the DVD G: drive causes error 116 upon bootup. F5 bypasses it but it bugs me. It doesn't work, either. BUT! Installing a CD/RW drive as a slave to G: (as H: ) makes the error go away, but does not resurrect G:.
Hmmmmmm.
Methinks I have more than one issue here. I am going to build a test bed computer and try each component at a time to see if it is the unit itself or something central to all of them, such as a bad power supply. Testing the power supply will have to wait until my digital multimeter (located in my wife's van) comes back from the repair shop, which is where her van is today.
It could also be a bad controller on the mobo. Or bad cables. Or a weird routing issue. Or something I never heard of before. Time will tell.
Oh yeah, my wife's laptop died sometime after 0300 this morning. It was working then but she reported an Operating System not found error this morning as I was just waking up. Half asleep, I told her the HD was fried and she will have to buy a new one. That is probably correct too.
Too bad about her data. We'll probably have to send the old drive out to a lab to recover any of that. Which, of course, contains her weekly billing information (due today) amounting to nearly $2000.
Sigh. If it's not one thing, it's another.
Now, I believe her laptop is under warranty, which should theoretically cover a fried hard drive but some companies can be quite creative when wriggling out of warranty claims. We shall see.
Thanks everyone!