It is a pretty good assumption that the hard drive has crashed.
If the hard drive platters are intact, then a professional data
recovery outfit should have no problems at swapping the electronics
card and/or drive motor of the hard drive and starting data recovery.

Was the HD a Maxtor by chance?
I have two that smoked a chip (Bubbled the chip case) on the HD logic card.
Suspect MBD regulator failure as the cause in my case. (Video card, memory,
processor were OK, so either the MBD or the HDs are the primary suspects.)
Like you, I first suspected the power supply.

A general rule is that if anything fails it is possible that a resultant
power surge will take something else with it.  This is, of course, most
common with power supply units.

You say that you can boot up to the slave hard drive.  If you were to swap
the master slave settings on the two hard drives and swap the ribbon cables
you would have a working computer.  If it accepts your hard drives in this
configuration you may be able to copy off your files before it finally dies
(and it is permanently disconnected).  If it doesn't accept your hard drives
in this configuration I'm afraid its back to Plan A (relying on the backup
or data recovery).  I can recommend someone to do this if you want.

Regards.

Bill Ridgeway
Computer Solutions

chadvandemark@gmail.com wrote in news:1167767826.458127.4640@
48g2000cwx.googlegroups.com:

Even though it's a longshot, take a read here:

http://www.deadharddrive.com/

can i get some input on my comp. dos and do nots

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