I'm having a problem with an old, but until recent, trusty 'ol Dell Dimension 8200. The original hard drive failed 3 years ago, so I pulled the original 40 gig and the 80 gig storage drive (which wasn't being used) and put them away. Somehow I convinced myself the 80 gig trashed as well, otherwise I would have used it from the beginning. So I dropped a single 20 gig Seagate drive, fired it up, and installed GNU/Linux. Worked just fine for the last 3 years. Yesterday I decided to see if I couldn't recover any data off the 40 and 80 gig drives. So, I find out the 80 gig is live and working. Cool! So I get all my original data off that drive, install GNU/Linux, transfer all my data off the 20 gig Seagate and I'm off and running. Worked fine all day, several shutdown/reboot cycles as well. Then I wanted to try one last time getting the data from the original 40 gig, to no luck. I gave up, slid the 80 gig with a fresh bake of GNU/Linux into the drive bay, connected the cables, and fired it up. "Failed to boot" -- Awesome. I tried and tried to fix the issue to no luck. I tried the other known-good 20 gig hard drive, same error. Tried a third known-good hard drive (from my laptop, with an adapter), same error.
All of the hard drives are recognized in the BIOS, and shows the proper size of the drive as well. But that is as far as it gets.
Could anyone help me with this with any suggestions on where or what I should be doing next?
Thanks in advance!