Hard drive related help please

[Xtro]

Good afternoon ladies and gents

My housemate is having pc woes and the poor man has asked me to help. To cut a long story short his PC stopped booting up and his HD was "clicky-clicky" ie. a dead parrot.

So he's just bought a new one, checked jumpers ok, I put the Win XP cd in the cd-rom and changed bios to boot from CD and...nothing.

It recognises the HD ok on bootup but then hangs right after its checked for Primary Master, Primary Sec, Secondary etc.

I did notice this line - Primary IDE Channel no 80 conductor installed. Which wasn't there before - can anyone help please?

Changed it to boot from floppy and all sorts - but no luck. it doesnt get anywhere near that part of bootup.

Cheers, TIA.

 

[TdC]

I think it's about the cable mate. "old" < ata66 cables had 40 pins, faster than 66 have 80 pins (for shielding iirc, but that doesn't matter in this case)

is the cdrom on "auto detect" in the bios? is the hdd set to master and accidentally plugged into the slave slot? or the cdrom? have a wee check.

 

[TdC]

also it may be worth checking that the cable hasn't been twisted, thus being inserted into mobo or drive the "wrong" way 'round. small odds for sure, but you wouldn't be the first, or last tbh.

also I want a reward for fast help: tokyo seems good enough

 

[Xavier]

If the cable is spooned it's possible the old drive isn't dead at all.

Get a new ATA/100 cable (beg or borrow preferrably) and try it with old and new drives, when you set up the new drive make sure it's both jumpered to master and on the master socket of the ATA cable, otherwise you could run into signalling issues.

Xav

 

[Xtro]

also it may be worth checking that the cable hasn't been twisted, thus being inserted into mobo or drive the "wrong" way 'round. small odds for sure, but you wouldn't be the first, or last tbh.

also I want a reward for fast help: tokyo seems good enough

Rah! Thanks a lot mate, I have sent him off t'shop to get a new cable from the guy he bought the HD off.

I checked - it hasnt been twisted round, and was in right way etc. The comp is only a TINY 600mhz POS so the new cable might do the trick fingers crossed. I shall try everything else after he's got that.

About tokyo...lend us 2 grand and i'll let you come with me Thanks a lot mate, I shall post back later. ta

 

[TdC]

no worries mate, hope things get fixed also, I'm flying off to New Zealand in 9 days, so it's ok I forgive the not-smuggling-me-to-tokyo thing

 

[Xavier]

XTro - what size drive did he buy?

 

[smurkin]

Rah! Thanks a lot mate, I have sent him off t'shop to get a new cable from the guy he bought the HD off.

I checked - it hasnt been twisted round, and was in right way etc. The comp is only a TINY 600mhz POS so the new cable might do the trick fingers crossed. I shall try everything else after he's got that.

About tokyo...lend us 2 grand and i'll let you come with me Thanks a lot mate, I shall post back later. ta

Probably no need to buy a new cable...just make sure you dont use cable select (jumpers on back of drive)...cable select (in my hands) wouldnt work with the old 40 conductor cables. So back to good old master/slave jumpers.

Of course if you do buy a 80 conductor cable, you can transfer data faster (urrmmm...UDMA 66 or whatever...sorry I'm vague ...I cant remember ) AND use cable select. Also you wont get that 80 conductor cable error coming up.

 

[Xtro]

Thanks a lot lads, its fixed now

Ended up taking it to the PC shop round the corner where he got the HD from.

It turned out that because his PC is old and a POS it wouldnt recognise a drive that size (it was 120gb). So he got a refund and took home a 40gb one and a ATA/100 cable (ta xav) and everything is hunky dory now.

grumble POS machine grumble