HDD issue

[Paul L]

My mother in law gave me her old computer because it would start for a few seconds then stop and continue to repeat the process until she unplugged it. I only wanted it for the extra hard drive. After installing the hard drive into my computer (wanting to format it then clone it since it is larger than the one I currently have) it caused my computer to start and stop even being set as a secondary or slave. If I completely unhook it from my computer and start it up again, My normal set up works fine. Any ideas about what could cause this?

 

[cliffordcooley]

There is only one answer, the drive has gone bad. Chances are the rest of the machine may still be good.

Will the old machine attempt to boot without a drive? Does it come up to a boot drive not found error? If it does, the HDD was the whole trouble.

 

[Paul L]

I will attempt to boot without the drive and see what happens. I will post the response tomorrow. Thanks.

 

[DelJo63]

The drive has a partition marked Active, has an MBR and a partition with an OS - - ergo it attempts to boot from it.

Boot from a CD (Like Linux), attach the drive using a USB adaptor,
and delete the partition.

 

[DelJo63]

One example of a Linux Boot CD is knoppix

 

[Frozwire]

It would be just a lot safer if you'll just get a new hard drive rather than compromising the other hardware of your system by that faulty hard drive.