Question : Problem: Hard Drives Won't Boot

I had a PC that was sitting in the back waiting to be recycled when some of the data on it was requested.  The machine was working fine but when I powered it up I was receiving a "non-system disk error, press enter to continue."  This machine ran Windows 2000 and had two hard drives.  When I move the secondary disk to a working machine the BIOS only recognizes it as a 8.45 GB HDD but it has a storage capacity of 180 GB.  Also when this HDD is installed it prevents Windows from booting, the splash screen freezes when the status bar is a little over half way done.  I have tried booting to the Live CD of Ubunutu to see if I could copy off the data but when the secondary disk is installed Ubunutu won't boot.  Any suggestions would be of help, also the data is worth a little more than $200 so a data recovery company isn't justified.

Answer : Problem: Hard Drives Won't Boot

Put the drives in an external enclosure.  Pull all jumpers off.  Don't get a fancy eSATA drive.  Just go for a simple USB.  I'm sure this is IDE being W2000.

Once you connect the USB and the host computer is running, go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Comptuer Management, Disk Management.

See if anything is showing up there.  Even if the partition is ruined, I'd say this would be a great way to identify a completely failed HD as opposed to a corrupt partition or MBR.  

If this route doesn't work, try getting this setup on some sort of Live CD.  If you want Linux shell commands, let me know.  I can help with that, but I'd rather not start spewing those out until you've tried the simpler tasks first :)

Good Luck, and please don't abandon this one.  I'm curious to see how this winds up!