A Hard Drive That Kills?

I was given an external hard drive from a friend a while back. He said it had stopped working for him and thought it had something to do with the power. I figured I'd rip it out of its enclosure and try it in my machines; 250 gb is to large to let waste. The problem I run into, is when trying to turn on a machine whilst the drive is plugged in. The computer will do nothing. The lights don't come on, there are no beeps, and the fans don't. I will have to reset the powersupply and unplug the drive for the computer to boot like normal. However, even though I can boot now, for some reason it corrupts my NTLDR, meaning I cant actually get into XP until I boot from my CD and recover the darned thing. It has performed the same way on two different computers, and my question is, is it completely hosed, or is there still a way I can utilize the storage. I'm also quite interested in what exactly is happening when it wont allow power to my machine, even if I wont be able to fix it. Thanks in advance for any helpful replies

Joseph

 

''I was given an external hard drive from a friend a while back. He said it had stopped working for him'' could this be why it wont work for you ???? Check settings in bios that you are not booting from this HD and have you set Jumper settings to Slave and connected on intermediary connection on ribbon (assuming of course that this is a slaved HD) & check power lead to HD is sitting tight to all 4 prongs as if one is loose these symptons will occur.

 

Does the BIOS of the two computers you've tried this drive on support a hd of 250GB size?

 

I have done everything you mentioned Toke, and everything seems to be in order.

As far as your question goes Plodr, I would assume yes. I built this machine from scratch less than a year ago, and have had portable HD of 500gb hooked up to it with no problem.

I've pretty much given up the idea of salvaging the drive, but I'm still quite curious as to how its malfunctioning.

Thanks for the responses so far!

 

Shot in the dark here, DL this wee prog and put to floppy and if the com does manage to boot you could get a reading of why the failure.

http://bootmaster.filerecovery.biz/index.html

 

If it is out of the enclosure try setting it as Master (I would unplug your current HD completely). See if the machine starts.

 

Hi Twist,

Power Supplies have protection circuits for over current and over/under voltage. When any of these conditions exist the PSU shuts down and has to be reset by removeing the AC input momentarily. Probably the drive has a short that is drawing way too much current. Bad filter capacitor? Maybe.

Good Luck, Jim