Hi all,
To keep a long story short, my boyfriend's G74 SX laptop screen suffered some serious damage from being hit by a flying cell phone. He was using his TV as a monitor the next day, and left his computer on and running for a half hour or so. When he returned, he got a black screen with a "Disk read error" sort of message. No matter what we did, we could not get Windows to boot at all. Unfortunately, he seems to have either lost or never even made the recovery disk. I attempted to get his information off his hard drives with no success; I was using a SATA/IDE to USB port to accomplish that, and I'm assuming there was nothing I could do because I couldn't hook up both hard drives at once. Because he has most of his data backed up elsewhere, I thought the best idea would be to format the hard drives and reinstall Windows altogether (I assumed, and still do assume, this is a Windows problem). Unfortunately, somehow the CD drive has also suffered damage, so I've had to use said SATA/IDE to USB cable to use an older CD drive with his computer. I have that hooked up, and I downloaded and wrote to a DVD the installation for his version of Windows, and fortunately, the code for his copy of Windows is on the back of his computer still.
The problem I'm running into is that Windows doesn't seem to recognize his formatted hard drives. In the process of messing around with the computer, it's been taken apart and put back together a bit. What I'm wondering is, does it matter which port the hard drives go into? Should I try reversing the places they're in and see if that helps? If that doesn't help, what's my next step? My thought is that the hard drives need to be partitioned again, but I have no idea how to do that with this setup at all (I've never even dealt with hard drives in an array, so I'm quite lost on how it's even set up or how it works). I always thought that Windows setup did partitioning, though, so even this seems wrong. Am I perhaps dealing with a dead hard drive?
Thanks for any help you can give.
Edit: After doing some mild research, I feel like it might be important to note that the BIOS recognizes the two hard drives as separate drives, and not as one. Windows recognizes neither. But maybe I'm wrong. It's all very confusing.
