Hello all. I would appreciate any help you could give to me on this matter. I've had my current setup for a while now, and suddenly my hard drives are giving me hell. I have 1 200GB western digital SE drive, and 1 120GB wesetern digital SE drive, both of them hooked to a PCI Controller card. In XP, I get the blue screen of death, indicating a hardware malfunction. As of now, I can't even boot. When the controller card BIOS tries to find a drive, none is found! My only clue here is the power supply. I have a 9800 Pro, DVD burner, 4 fans, and a volcano HSF all sucking power. I'm not sure what my power supply is, my guess would be in the 300 range. Any suggestions?
Shouldnt be the PSU -- 300w should be enough to run all that. Make sure its a 300 and not a 250. You try resetting the bios?
Disconnect the slave drive, check your cable, check to see that your PCI controller card is properly docked and then go into your CMOS (bios) and see if your drives are listed. Try and boot with the hard disk that contains only your operating system. If that doesn’t work then bypass the PCI controller and hook directly to the IDE slot on your board and try each disk separately, if that fails try a new cable. If all that fails then try them in another PC. Make sure that your hard disks are not mounted on top of each other because these babies get hot (I have two of the 120 gig SE western digitals). Heat is the number one killer of hard disks. _ _X_X_X_X_X_[small]"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Sherlock Holmes (by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)[/small]
Thanks, I figured out the problem. I hooked them directly to the motherboard, don't know why I thought I needed a ATA controller card. Thanks for the advice.
Once again I'm in need of help! As I said before I hooked directly to the motherboard. I would consider it could be the IDE controller causing the problem on the mobo, or maybe the IDE cables themselves. But this could only be explained if I didn't have a noise along with my problem. I opened up the case and listened carefully. My hard drive seems to randomly make a sound, in which is sounds like it stops and powers back up. I can't really describe the sound, just sounds like it's turning off and on. I hear the noise, then here the hard drive start to spin. I've tested it with WD diagnostics, no problems there. Does this have to be a power supply issue? Thanks.
Could there be a chance that your power options for the hard drive got set to cycle off at a short period(3/5 minutes) giving you the random start-stop sounds? Just a guess. Jerry
Seems to just be the 200GB, my baby!, giving me the trouble. Even though it was set as a slave, it still caused problems in the OS somehow. I guess I have no choice except sell it on ebay as a "broken drive" and some nut will buy it.
First of all did you try to boot with only one hard disk? Try each individually and see if they are working on their own. If they were both working fine at one time and now they're not then you may have a bad hard disk.
