HDD is toast

[Shortbus]

Well was working on fixing my home pc the other night and all of a sudden the HDD made some grinding noises and then the system halted. I shut the PC down and when I booted the the Bios screen came up and then started to detect the HDD and immediately the PC shut itself down.

So I buy a new Seagate 80G just a refurb for 69.00 (this pc is a pos so I don't care what brand size ect.) I only use it to browse AF while home, and pay a few bills online get email.

Anyway I put it in and of course my BIOS is to old to recognize the full 80gig, I remove the drive again and jumper it to the size limit setting which was around 32 gig or so. Anyway the bios recognizes it now but I can't get XP to load on it. The CD rom light won't even blink when the harddrive software ask's for me to insert the bootable cd and press spacebar, it just hangs and then I have to restart.

Not sure what to do from this point, I am going to make the CD rom (I only have one in the system) the secondary master in the BIOS setup tonight and see if that solves the problem.

If anyone else has any tips send em my way though I won't be able to check them until after this weekend and I'm back to work. Hopefully I will get it going and be online again tonight though.

[Plastic_Fork]

Ouch - a head crash is a bad thing.

As for the new hard drive, what processor do you have? What motherboard? Do you know the chipset of the board? Have you checked your motherboard manufacturer's site for BIOS updates? What's the BUS speed of the board? I'm assuming your hard drive is ATA100 (UDMA5)? Does your board only support ATA66 (UDMA4)? If it only supports ATA66, you may need to set the HDD down to ATA66 to work with the board properly as well although most newer drives will auto-adjust.

Most of the time board manufacturers will have BIOS updates as well to accomodate newer/larger hard drives.

Also, since this is your only hard drive I would recommend doing exactly that - make sure you jumper the drive as a single drive and set it as primary master and use the CD-ROM as secondary master. Just for the sake of asking though, you did jumper the CD-ROM to slave and jumper the HDD to master when trying it the first time on the same IDE channel?

Also, make sure your RAM modules are firmly in their sockets. I've seen that make XP hang during the installation boot-up. Oh, and another good idea - make you clear the ESCD from BIOS. Sometimes you gotta let the BIOS re-detect everything to make it run skippy. Especially when swapping hard drives.

[Shortbus]

I just came into work to get my camera for a sec but I'll check out the details on my bios. On a side note I got the drive working properly but half way through XP installation the computer shut off. Now it is just shutting itself down anywhere from 30 secs to 1 min after the boot screen shows. I am going to buy a new power pack since the old one is making noise (the fan) and it is only a 150w.

Hopefully that will solve this problem.

John

[Plastic_Fork]

Yeah, that'll solve the shutdown issue. When the PSU starts acting up, the board and CPU don't get enough power to function properly and odd things happen. The PC shutting down on it's own like that it a common symptom of a bad PSU.

Might be why the installation wasn't working either to begin with. What processor do you have? I would recommend a 350w supply minimum if it's a Pentium 3 or equivalent, 450w if it's a Pentium 4 or equivalent. Otherwise a 250w should suffice. Just remember, the slot1/slot2 architecture CPU's eat more power than the FC-PGA architectures.

[Shortbus]

^Wheeeeeeeeeee I bought a 350W power pack (doesn't fit in my old case) no worries though I'm buying a new case this week. All is fixed and the home pc is back online. I am running a mere PIII 600mhz. Pretty oldschool but It's all I need since I don't play games or have any processor intensive apps to run.

[Plastic_Fork]

Nah, it's not that bad. I run a PIII 1.2ghz. Sufficient for everything I do.