Pc not booting up whilst 2nd HDD is connected.

I've got 2 hard drives, one for operating system, the other one is for all my data/music/files.

Its been running great for a few years, rock solid, never a problem... until I downloaded a crack/code for soundforge off a dodgy warez type site.

Since then, I've not been able to reboot, not even in safe mode. I went into the insides of the PC and through trial and error, disconnected one of the hard drives (not the C windows one) and it boots up fine with just the C drive on its own.

I believe I've cleaned my C drive of all trojans and infections 100% clean, and double checked at trend micro and panda scans online, avg anti spyware, spybot and avast. So the C drive is probably not infected with anything.

But what can i do about my other hard drive, when i connect it, (with the pc off obviously), then I cant get the pc to boot up at all, and thats the drive thats got all my data on, so I'll be needing it on and working by sunday evening so I can carry on with my work.

In my BIOS it seems to notice the 2nd (both SATA btw) drive detected there alongside the first, as the primary slave.

p.s. in case this has any bearing on the matter...I tried doing a windows repair using my windows xp disc early on in the equation before i could find out what was wrong, and it wouldn't even let me go on to install the windows on C, as it 'did not contain a windows xp compatible partition on the disc above'. Prompting me to go back and create a windows partition, of which I know absolutely nothing about, but that seemed very odd, don't recall that problem installing xp ever before. I did notice my 2nd HDD listed too, in the options of where to place the XP installation but i didn't want to write on that HDD being that all my music/files/data are stored on there!

Any suggestions?

 I have a few recent back ups of the registry settings from using ccleaner.

Maybe I should try using one of the registry back ups its saved, (if i knew how to do that safely without losing work or reintroducing dodgy stuff back into the PC)

Do you have another computer you can try the 2nd drive in if not for anything else you could possible copy the data off of it and wipe the drive. Just an idea! Start back with a fresh drive

tametiger:

I wonder if my work here is done,,, or there's anything else I should be doing now?

You might want to run all the free adware/spyware and antivirus scans that you can to ensure your rig is free of malware (especially if you use it for online banking). Congrats for solving your problem, tametiger!