When I boot up my computer, it gets stuck at the "detecting IDE drives" The weird thing is that if I restart my computer again it goes through and I go into windows and everything seems to work fine. However if I shut down my computer and turn it on again it gets stuck on the "detecting IDE drives" so I have to restart the computer for it to load into windows and everything seems to be fine. Anyone know a solution to this? The hard drive that is causing the issue used to be my external harddrive when it stopped working so I put it in my desktop to see if the problem would fix it self. It's an old 250GB IDE drive. The computer boots fine without it so I know the hard drive or cable might be giving the problem. I tried unplugging and plugging the cables back in but it didn't help. Should I format my hard drive to see if that fixes the problem? Any other suggestions?
switch the ide ports around so that the drive is connected to the secondary ide not the primary. have you changed cables?
also try doing a scandisk (with the box to fix errors checked) on all the partitions on that drive. If there is any file corruption it will cause the problem you describe.
lol, when i scan disk my main hard drive my computer crashes. I have no clue what's wrong with it. I'll try to scan the IDE drive and set it to secondary and get back to you guys. Thanks!
Ok so I scanned all my drives and nothing came up. I just noticed my CD ROM doesn't read any CDs, not even my windows xp pro cd so I can't reformat my computer. It worked like two weeks go when I installed office 2007. You think it's a virus of some sort?
does the bios see the drive? is there an exclamation mark in device manager & does an error code like 39 popup?
Thanks ddp for your reply. The Drive itself is recognizable in "my computer" My main problem is that when I put in a CD ROM of any kind, it will not read it. Last night I opened it up to check for disks but didn't really find any. I used Dust off which is that can full of air that you spray to get the dust off. Afterwards, whenever I put in a CD I feel like it's trying to read the CD but is struggling for some reason. It makes a repetitive sound and does not recognize the CD. In the Device Manager, I see 3 yellow exclamation marks under "other devices". They are "Other PCI Bridge Device" "PCI Memory Controller" and "SM Bus Controller" I'm not sure what they are for. I have tried a system restore back one month because I know it was working then as I have installed software through my CD drive. I still have to restart my computer after turn on for it load into windows. My hard drive is still doing the same thing.
The CD Rom sounds like it's struggling to read the CD. I don't understand why it would suddenly do that.
The IDE Channel is set to ultra DMA 5. You think my DVD Burner is just faulty? My computer recognizes it as a drive but it won't read any type of CDs.
try uninstalling it from device manager & restart windows so can find new hardware & load driver. try booting off the xp cd to see what happens. try the drive in another pc.
I uninstalled the DVD Burner from the device manager and restarted. The BIOS recognizes it and my computer also recognizes it. However when I put in a windows xp pro CD into it, it struggles to read it for like 15 seconds then stops. And when I double click the CD ROM Drive there is nothing in there. I tried restarting with it and it won't load windows xp installation blue screen. Actually what I noticed was that it stops at "booting from CD" unless I take the CD out then it loads windows. I was wondering if there was any settings I can change for the DVD burner to read cds.
