HD problems
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Thread: HD problems

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
    Posts
    17

    Question HD problems

    Well I got know clue whats goin on with my hard drives... Here is what happened... hopefully somebody can help

    Well I purchased a new Western Digital HD after my something happened to the OS on my old HD... I installed it and made the old HD a slave... initially the setup gave me some problems, but after some tweaking I got it working... about a couple of months later (today) something happened... my computer was about to freeze up on me like it normally does (I dont know what causes it, Im guessing heat... I dont have good airflow in my comp) but something wierd happened... I heard what sounded like 3 clicks... or snaps... I dont know what but after I powered down and restarted it wasnt reading my HDs... After some intial reboot tests I finally got something... It read my WD HD but not my slave... Im sure I got all the connections and jumper settings right cause it has been working fine for months... But as of now it isn't reading my slave and when I tried taking out the slave the primary doesnt work (im guessing thats cause I didnt set the jumper settings)... I guess I could live with the fact that I lost my slave HD but for some reason it still is giving me trouble sometimes when I reboot and doesnt read my master... Anybody know whats going on? Did I just fry the slave? Do I need new HD cables? Do I need an ATA controller card?

    Info about my comp: the WD HD is ATA 133 capable but my MB cant handle it... I got a 850 AMD T-bird with 300+ ram... my slave HD is a IBM.. I hope somebody can help

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2000
    Location
    San Bernardino, CA, USA
    Posts
    1,084
    Hi, HalfCaste!

    When you changed your old IBM hard drive from master to slave, did you change the jumper setting on the back of the drive from master to slave?

    Is your new OS (operating system) on the master, as it should be?

    Did you remove the OS from your old hard drive, now a slave, perhaps by reformatting?

    Two drives with the jumpers set wrong will cause problems, as will conflicting OS folders on 2 drives, both with visible OS partitions.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Mar 2000
    Location
    San Bernardino, CA, USA
    Posts
    1,084
    Sorry, I see you already know about jumpers.

    Before trying anything more fancy, you might try this, if you haven't already.

    **Turn off & disconnect power to tower.
    **Remove both HDDs from case.
    **Check jumpers on back of the new WD.
    **Put the new WD drive back, jumpered to Master, and make doubly sure it is on the Primary IDE. Connect its power cord.
    **Reconnect power to tower.
    **With a boot floppy in the A:\ drive, start the machine and access your CMOS. (That's F1 while booting on mine.)
    **Reset CMOS to defaults.
    **Continue booting to A:/ prompt.

    See if this restores your system to "seeing" the HDD. If not, it might be best if you could access another machine, and add the WD drive as a slave to it as a preliminary to finding out what is wrong with it.

    Good luck.

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Oct 1999
    Location
    Huntington Beach, CA, USA
    Posts
    3,137
    Well I purchased a new Western Digital HD after my something happened to the OS on my old HD...
    Often when an operating system fails for seemingly no reason, it could be bad sectors on the drive. If you never tested the drive (scandisk), you may have developed more (not that you could prevent that). If enough bad sectors develope, especially in the boot sector, the drive can become inaccessible.

    If the hard drive fails, it can keep another device chained with it from being detected as well.
    Jumper each drive as Single or Master.
    Connect only one drive to the 40 pin connector.
    Make sure the power connector is hooked up.
    Listen to the drive as you start the computer. You should hear it spin up.
    Watch the screen to see if the BIOS shows a drive connected.
    If no drive is detected, try another connector on the 40pin cable and/or try a different cable.
    Check the power connector by plugging it into another device such as a CDROM and see if that device lights up at boot.
    If you get "No operating system", use a boot disk and try to read the drive.

    Do this with the other drive. If they both fail, try the other IDE channel.

    Heat can kill the electronics in a hard drive and shorten its life. It could cook other parts of your computer as well.

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