Hard drive Problems.

[johnmayo]

Hello. My mom has a Dell 2400 with a 1.7ghz p4 , 768mb of pc2700, a 80 gig maxtor ide hard drive..everything has been well with it until last night..she said on the phone that it turned off and wouldnt boot up...when i went over there to see what the problem was it said there is no hard drive...i checked all the cables and jumpers and i also tried another hard drive still no luck.. does anyone know whats wrong?

 

[Tedster]

is it getting power?

 

[johnmayo]

yes..i hear it turning on.

 

[Tmagic650]

Make sure the test drive is jumpered "cable select". If you still can't see the drive, the IDE controller might be bad... this bad controller doesn't happen to often though

 

[Samstoned]

you have to open'er up to feel the drive spinning or is it that loud.
do you have a boot disc you can use to find the drive
I'd say it may have stopped working

 

[johnmayo]

it was working for like two weeks before this happened..and it was in the master jumper setting and i have tried every jumper setting and with no jumper and other harddrives and still no luck. why would it quit working like that?

and yes i am sure it on.i have opened it up.

 

[Tmagic650]

"why would it quit working like that?"
To answer this question we would have to know what the trouble was. You said that you tried another IDE cable, drive, and jumper settings. Have you reset the motherboards bios? Have you removed all the other devices on the IDE channels (CD ROMs, burners etc.) and tried the hard drive again?

 

[johnmayo]

Yes i have.

 

[Samstoned]

so disk is spinning that a yes ?
try the other ide connetion on MB
could have lost the i/o controller
it's happened to me on both a compaq and a dell
check for caps leaking and or puffy
a capacitor is the cylinder things on the board
try reinstall of the MB controllers
last is bios upgrade
disk drives do just quit

 

[Tmagic650]

Nice post Samstoned,
there is a device called a "PCI based IDE controller card" available at a low price, and if you have room and an available PCI slot, one can be installed easily. I don't know if all PCI IDE controller cards provide bootable service though. I have one installed in my Antec Server case. It has 2 IDE ports, that support 4 additional IDE devices. I don't boot from this card though

 

[johnmayo]

I will try that..

 

[kathe]

Put your hard disk on a computer which can be normally used to test that whether your hard disk has troubles or not. If you've confirmed that the problem is caused by hard disk, you need to take your HD to the service station for reparation or exchange.

 

[Samstoned]

sometimes not up to the pci device to control boot but the bios as well needs to recognize the bootable device
IE: scsi controllers all are seen as bootable on NT systems
I had a promise that did ide 133 doc's said it would boot only if the MB supported the feature
I guess most newish boards do that now

 

[johnmayo]

its not the harddrive..its the ide controller

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