PC taking an hour to start after hd unplugged

[jcmaciel]

I apologize in advance for my complete lack of computer knowledge, but here goes.
I have 2 gateways, 1 of them just stopped working, going to the gateway screen and doing nothing, I called them they just say sounds like you need a new motherboard give me a link for a place that's out of stock and doesn't know when they're getting new ones and that's it. So Im thinking I need stuff off that hard drive and if it's just the motherboard I can probably just plug that hard drvie into my working computer and get the info off of it. I plug the hard drive into the working computer and it does the same thing, sits at the gateway screen doing nothing. So I'm thinking maybe it's not the motherboard that's broken maybe it's the hard drive. So I decide to try and plug the hard drive from the working computer into the non working computer and it works, so I'm guessing it's a bad hard drive and not motherboard.

That I'm not so much worried about at this very moment as when I put my working computer back together, plugged it's own hd back in, it's taking an hour to load, first it goes to a cmos bios utilities screen after 20-30 min, not knowing what to pick I chose the fail safe start option or whatever and after another 30 minutes it finally starts. So completely at the point of regretting ever opening the side of the computer can anybody tell me how to get my working computer to not take an hour to start please.

Crystal

 

[raybay]

More likely a defective hard drive. Do not use it longer, until you know, so that you can still recover the data later.
When you put the hard drive into another computer, the Windows Install will detect the move as a possible violation of Windows Install and stop you.
You really need an experienced friend, or you will spend two or three days getting to a place where you can use it.
Do you still have the recovery disk set that came with the computer?
Hard drives are relatively cheap now at www.directron.com, www.zipzoomfly.com, www.tigerdirect.com, and many other sites. If your current drive is two or three years old, or is a Maxstor, Samsung, Tri-Gem, or silver colored Western Digital drive, you can guess that your hard drive is bad...

 

[SNGX1275]

You may have screwed something up with the Windows install on the good hard drive when you put it in the other computer.

When you put the 'bad' hard drive in the good computer, what happened? Does the drive sound different? Unless its a bad electrical issue there really is no way that would have damaged the good computer.

So put the good hard drive back in the good computer, make sure everything is shut off and its unplugged from the wall, and reset the CMOS. Once that is done then hopefully you are back to good on boot times. Is it working properly when it finally boots up?

You really shouldn't ever swap windows drives between computers and try to boot up with them. What you should have done is put the suspected bad one as slave (if its ide) or just connected it to sata port if its sata, and booted as normal.

 

[mailpup]

Putting the bad hard drive in your working PC may have caused the IDE channel it was connected to to revert to PIO mode. On your working PC check the channel that the hard drive is connected to in the Device Manager. Go to Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager. Under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, see if any of the controllers are operating under the slower PIO mode instead of the faster DMA or UDMA modes. If so, you can try to change it there or if it is grayed out, you can uninstall the channel, reboot and let Windows reinstall it automatically. See if that works.