So, for the past year or so, I've had a Seagate 300GB SATA harddrive as a slave drive in my PC with a 160GB PATA drive as my master. (Asus A8V motherboard by the way)

Yesterday, without warning and for no apparent reason, my computer started acting odd. It would lock up for about a second, then allow for normal opperation for the next 5 then continuously repeat that cycle. I immediately thought I had a failing harddrive, but none of my drives were making any kind of noise.

I immediately thought it was my PATA because I've never had a single problem with my SATA drive. I couldn't log into Safe Mode, I couldn't get a command prompt, I couldn't do ANYTHING. I'm not sure why I did it, but I decided to unplug my SATA drive first to start the troubleshooting. Sure enough, the computer fired up and worked FLAWLESSLY.

I plugged in the SATA drive again. The VIA RAID divers/software found the drive and listed all of it's attributes. It took me about an hour to do the same thing through "My Computer", but when I finally got it to post in Windows, it showed 0 Bytes free and 0 Bytes total space.

Now, this wouldn't be that big of a deal, but I had all my music and downloaded files/software on that drive. Not to mention all my gaming files.

My question is this....am I screwed? Is my harddrive gone? Should I give up and just go buy a new one and start over? OR, is there a way to fix this? The drive itself doesn't make any odd clicking noises at all. I was told that the controller board on the harddrive itself may have gone bad and can be switched out. How difficult is it to do this? Is that a feasable option?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.