Need help with my storage drive

[baelon]

I set up dual booting with gentoo / xp on my 320gb sata drive. Later on I added a 1tb sata drive for storage to the system. I booted to XP and formatted it there in ntfs, since I'm a newbie to Linux and didn't want to goof it up. The drive was working fine in xp and I started putting junk on it. But I had goofed anyway when I put the drive in a lower sata port than my boot drive. When I edited it into fstab and tried booting into gentoo I got a looping error, don't remember specifics. Looking back, it was telling me the first drive it found wasn't set up to boot but I didn't know that. I rebooted and tried a few more times but it didn't work, so I booted back to XP and both drives were still working fine.

A day later I rebooted and went afk, forgot I had grub set to wait 30 seconds and then boot gentoo. This let the error loop till its end where my PC froze. When I rebooted my bios wasn't recognizing the 1tb drive, and still isn't. I've tried resetting my cmos, no change. The error message in the boot log is Comreset failed, errno=-16. Google turned up a few bugs, but nothing like my situation.

I have a feeling it's not a dead drive, since it would be a hundred to one shot it would fail at that exact moment. What would Gentoo do to a drive if it wasn't set to boot from that drive, and how do I reverse it?

[rokytnji]

When I rebooted my bios wasn't recognizing the 1tb drive, and still isn't.

If bios isn't recognising your hardrive I would start out by unplugging hardrive and replug it in with computer powered down. Then I would reset bios to defaults settings and save and reboot and see what happens.

[i92guboj]

I'd plug off your power cable, take off the small battery from your mother board, unplug and re-plug your hd, wait a few seconds, plug both things into their respective places again and try.

[baelon]

Thanks for the advice, but it's a no-go. I'm going to RMA the drive. I'm awfully suspicious concerning the timing of the drive's death, but whatever.