Windows 7 Installation

The past two days have been tough but the Lord is merciful.

• Both SATA drives failed for some reason. Probably a delayed write failure.
• Primary drive which contained the OS would boot up to the windows logo, then encounter just a black screen
• Secondary drive had no OS
• Both drives were still seen in BIOS
• after enabling S.M.A.R.T. in BIOS, both drives encountered an error "Hard Disk Error"
• This made me suspect that both drives might be failing (highly unlikely but wierd things have happened before)
• Purchased a new HDD
• After much difficulty (perhaps due to old media) Windows 7 was installed in the new HDD
• Hooked up the secondary drive (the one with no OS) to this new primary drive. Both seen in BIOS, but in windows explorer, the secondary drive cannot be seen. Checked "disk management". Secondary drive has a yellow triangle with an exclamation point. Cannot be manipulated (format, partitioned, etc). Installed EaseUS recovery software and was able to get some files off the HDD. Would have gotten more out if not for the 2 GB limit (encouraging the user to upgrade). Just recovered the important files. Just for the record, tried several other recovery software like Pandora, Puran, etc. but none of these were helpful in this scenario. Wish there was better software than EaseUS since that 2 GB restriction is a difficulty if you have HDD sizes in the hundred GB range
• Thankfully, the old primary HDD was seen when hooked up as a secondary drive. Volumes seemed to be intact. Running chkdsk on each drive as of this writing. Will update this post if there are interesting developments. 

Update:

• The computer has been locking up more frequently since the hard drive replacement. CPU usage seems to spike during these times and applications show a NOT RESPONDING tag.
• Experienced several BSODs, and one was BAD POOL CALLER. Might be related to the Windows updates that the computer was installing automatically so I disabled these
• Probably a MOBO, PROC, MEMORY issue, so I might as well look into the possibility of replacing all these three plus the power supply, because as a unit, these devices have been together for about 5 years now. It has been a good run, but now, my MOBO may be damaging my drives.
• Just thankful that data has been recovered and transferred to other storage media. Will update this post if the MOBO et al replacement was a success and all the troubleshooting issues have been cleared.

Update 12/29/2013:

•  Replaced the MOBO, and with that, had to replace the PROCESSOR, RAM, POWER SUPPLY, and even DVD drive since all of my previous drives were IDE based and the new mother boards only support SATA devices. Even had to replace memory because my old one was DDR2 and the new board requires DDR3.
• PROC is a 3.4 GHz AMD A4-5300 APU with Radeon HD 7480D
• Board is an MSi FM2-A55M-E33
• RAM is 4GB
• Windows detected most devices except the sound and the built-in NIC (Ethernet / LAN port). Windows installed generic sound drivers for the audio but I couldn't hear anything from my speakers. Tried updating all drivers with the DVD that came with the MOBO. Started with chipset, then progressed from video, to audio, then finally LAN. Catalyst Control Center was giving all sorts of errors from explorer has stopped working to Load MMdriver has stopped working. (Perhaps because I've updated the chipset drivers AFTER installing a bunch of other software - VLC Player, photo editing, etc.) But at least I got the sound driver installed in the process and I finally heard the Windows chime when logging in. So after some research, I decided to uninstall Catalyst Control Center. Surprisingly, the sound still works even after uninstalling, but then there was this unplugged - plugged annoyance. Followed this YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCQOTBXFznw to change the settings of Realtek Audio controls. No more annoying pop-ups.