Hard Disk Or Soft-Disk !!

This will be one of the longest posts you have ever seen , so please be patient reading it .

I am running windows xp with sp2 included , mother board MSI Neo , processor 2.2 Mhz intel celeron , memory 256 whatever , and a 80 gb seagate barracoda hard disk ,today a friend came by with his Hard disk (seagate barracoda 80 gb too) so that we could transfer some data he requested (movies and Stuff), his hard was the primary slave , mine was primary master , every thing went ok until , while copying some files , the windows xp ballon tips told us that some files are corrupted in the volume we are in , so i opened my computer to see what happened and guess what :

1: all the second hard disk's partions labels were removed and it's like "local disk" .

2: all the partitions are unaccessable , when trying to access the access is denied .

3: all the data included in the hard disk disappeard.

So , I used one of my recovery programs to scan the hard disk and after scanning the partitions , we found that all the data were safe and restoreable , it's so confusing that the recovery toll told us that the quality of the data was EXCELLENT so nothing really happend , we had scanned and restored all the data by recovering them to my hard drive , Formatting the Corupted Partition , then copying it back to the partition , this procedure was so painfully slow and took us about 6 hours to restore all the 80 gb of files and folders ,now please try to answer my questions :

a: Practically , we haven't done anything , the data were already found on the corrupted partition , the Procedure "From the Partition , to my partition , and back againwards" isn't worth the time and effort , Is there any other way to Force the partition to work again without recovering files that were already there and formatting ?

b: Given that me and my friend are PRETTY SURE that we have no viruses , worms or parasites containd in our files , Could this be a software Proplem (my friend told me that this accident happened once before but with only one corrupted partition) ?

c: Could this be an overheat issue?

d: What are the steps that my friend must take to make sure this won't happen again ?


Thanx in Advance , especially for bieng patient to read all this .