Windows 7: Hard drive crashed, getting "The semaphore timeout period has expired"

My primary SATA hard drive crashed and would not boot, and the Windows 7 install dvd could not repair it, I went through the repair steps several times. I had Windows 7 Professional 32bit installed on it.

So I removed the crashed drive and installed an older SATA hard drive (Seagate 300gb) and installed Windows 7 Professional 32bit on it.

I then connected the hard drive that crashed (a Seagate ST31500341AS 1.5TB) to a spare SATA port on the motherboard in hopes of copying files from it to an external USB hard drive.

The Seagate drive that crashed has 3 partitions on it, the first one is the native 100mb partition that Windows 7 created during installation, the second one is the C partition with the Windows 7 installation on it, and the third one is the D partition I used for backup.

I was able to access the D partition of the crashed hard drive and copy all of my files to an external USB hard drive.

But when I click on the C partition on the crashed hard drive using Windows Explorer, it shows to be empty. And the green progress bar at the top of Windows Explorer in the navigation bar takes a long time to go from left to right. Then I get an error that says "THE SEMAPHORE TIMEOUT PERIOD HAS EXPIRED". Windows Explorer crashes after I get the error.

Everything is connected to the same computer, I am not transferring any files over a wireless router or the network. I read several articles about this error but they all referred to transferring files over a wireless router or the network.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I have searched and read several articles but none of them were related to my particular issue.

Also, the C partition on the crashed drive was a 400gb partition and had a lot of free space.

Everything was working great on the drive that crashed, I shut down my computer and the next time I turned it on, it wouldn't boot.

UPDATE - Just ran chkdsk on the C partition and it showed to be a RAW partition, looks like the hard drive bit the dust so I'll be getting another one. :-(

Thank you,
Dano