immediate shutdown problem

A few weeks ago I installed a new ATA hard drive on my system for storage everything worked fine. I than did a reinstall of Windows (upgrading to XP pro from XP home) and during the install my computer shut down completely.

Pressing the power switch would get lights, fan, dead in about 1 sec. I would have to unplug and plug back in to get the same result. First thought was power supply, so I replaced that...same result :cry

Started to troubleshoot and discovered I could boot with the new hard drive out of the loop. Completed install just fine and now I want to get the new hard drive back in the loop (lots of data on it and just the principle of the thing)

I assumed (bad idea) that the board on the hard drive must have went during the install so I obtained the matching drive and swapped the boards. Same result when I installed the drive. damn :cry

Just grasping for straws I found that I could get bios if I took the original hard drive out of the loop and just put in the new drive. (seems it was never the problem) I can not get a boot with both hard drives in no matter how I set the jumpers. (Typical master slave is what they were set at before. I tried setting them both to cable select and about every other combination in case my drive lit was incorrect.) still shuts off after about 1 sec. Even tried hooking up drive with just power no IDE cable and got the same result.

Computer works fine with one drive so I am ruling out Mobo, CPU, etc. Anyone have a suggestion for how I can get both drives up and running?

 

A little early in the process to be trying that out

This sounds like a power problem, can you add a molex splitter to the supply to your boot drive and use the extension to power your new drive?

 

Did you check the jumpers on the drives? Your original hard drive should be jumpered as Master and plugged in to the end of the data cable. The new drive should be jumpered as Slave and should be on the 2nd position on the same data cable as the original drive. The CD/DVD drives should be jumpered the same on their own cable. You may want to make sure that you have new 80pin data cables for both the HDs and the CD/DVDs. It may also be a power problem as suggested above. If both the old and new power supply are really small (meaning they have low power specs) then you can be fairly certain that this is the problem. There's also a chance that the motherboard is bad. I'm curious: why did you buy an identical drive and then swap the circuit board? Why go through the trouble of removing the circuit boards when you could have simply just swapped the entire drive? You're lucky you didn't damage anything, but you did void the warranties on both drives.

EDIT- oops :-o I somehow missed "tried hooking up drive with just power no IDE cable and got the same result". This almost guarantees a power problem, but it wouldn't hurt to check my suggestion above too.

 

Huge thank you for the help...no luck yet...

Its a 550W power supply so it should be more than enough for what I have. 2 HDD, 1 DVD burner, Vid card (older), athalon xp CPU, audigy gamer (older) sound card. The power supply runs on two 12V rails.

There are two 4 pin connectors coming out of the PS, I tried configuring with the drives both on one with splitters and on different ones.

I made the jump to swapping the boards because it fit the symptoms and seemed (and was) pretty easy.

i am going to maxtor's website and get the jumper configs for my original drive to make sure they are correct for master. (could be an issue if it was set to cable select and the other drive is a slave) I have my doubts since this config worked prior to the XP pro upgrade. I am beginning to wonder if it has something to do with xp pro.

Think I should try to set the bios up for two drives manually than connecting the drive? Feels like a long shot.