Thread: Odd Hard Drive Issue

I was scavenging some of my old computers and building my sons computer up a little bit. I pulled a 60 gig Western Digital drive from an old Dell system I had.

Installed the drive, all appeared to be doing well. Trying to format the drive however was a different story, on quick format the drive would crash, standard format the drive would stall.

I downloaded Western Digital utilities, it found an error and repaired it.

Now format worked fine. I however was getting issues when using the drive, defragging the drive, working with the drive etc would cause a blue screen of death at times.

So I disconnected the drive, computer now wont even make it passed the initial screen, not even into bios.

I cleared the chmos battery, checked chmos settings, changed ide cable, changed the ide channel the drive is on. Disconnected all other drives and this 'good' drive simply wont let the computer get passed the initial screen UNLESS I hook the 'bad' drive up to it.

For now I have the old drive hooked up, but have deleted the partion so windows doesn't play with it at all.

Any ideas?

My knowledge of hard drives is limited, but I think you need to check the jumpers on the drives and make sure they have the proper settings. i.e. Are they cable select or jumper select? If it is jumper select, make sure the jumpers are set as primary master and secondary master. If both are cable select, make sure the jumpers are on the cable select setting.

If you can, try booting to recovery console and running...

Code:

chkdsk /r

That will repair bad sectors.

You might also want to see if the BIOS comes up when no drives are plugged in.

Tried it all, with no drive hooked up bios comes up.
The only time bios will not load is if the 'good drive' is hooked up at all without the bad drive. It's really odd to say the least.

Have you solved the problem yet?

I was thinking maybe try another drive as the secondary master and see if the behavior changes. I doubt it's the master boot record since that comes up after the BIOS, and yours wont even get that far. It's a long shot, but you can do...

Code:

chkdsk /fixmbr

... at the recovery console just in case it is the master boot record.

I've tried a different drive, no go, it has to the be 'bad' drive. It makes no sense.

Hi! Why not to take your computer to the service center? If you can't cope with the issue it is the best way out, to my mind

yes your right.. your computer must need to rest..:sneaky: