Installation of 2nd HDD = no boot

I'm stumped. I think my 2nd hard drive has crashed or is crashing and at this point I just want to try and retrieve some data. I've not seen anything like this before. First, the computer is kinda old.

Iwill KA266plus
1.6 AMD
Windows XP Pro
C: = IBM Deskstar 40 GB
D: = Seagate 40 GB
PNY Geforce 4200 Ti

but the drives have never given me any problems. The D drive I just use mostly for backing up stuff, however it has a lot of digital family pictures on it. I back those up to DVD occassionally but I have not done it in a while. So, that's the data I'm after.

Anyway, the computer started running really slooooow. Click on My Computer and five minutes later the windows opened. I noticed the D: wasn't being listed. So, whatever, I figured goofy windows and rebooted the computer. The computer would post, load the windows splash screen and the the monitor would go blank. Then nothing. I would have to reboot. It wouldn't do anything but what I described. WTF?

So I pulled the D: out of my computer and hooked it up to my wife's computer. Same thing happened but when I detached the drive from my wife's computer it would not boot back up at all until I eventually cleared the CMOS.

So I went back to my computer fired it up WITHOUT the D: in it and it works perfectly. Fast, smooth, no lag, etc. Put that goofy drive back in there and it happens again. I've tried in my computer three different ribbon cables (the D: is the primary slave) and reset the CMOS. I just want the machine to boot with the D: in it so I can run the manufacturer's diagnostic software or get my pictures off there. I was thinking about trying to boo the computer with the D: set as the secondary master and unattach my optical drives because I have only 2 ide interfaces on the mobo. I can't figure out why it's preventing the whole machine from booting? Any help would be very appreciated.

 

What part of the report would you like me to post?

And thanks for your help.....

 

Mine

Athlon Palomino 1.6 Ghz
512 MB Ram (I just noticed one stick is ddr pc1600 and the other is pc2100)
Power supply 250 W
CDRW 48x16x48
Sony DVD 8x4 etc
geforce 4200 Ti
Audigy 2 sound card

Wife's

Durn 750
768 MB PC133
Power Supply ??? (I can't find the specs without taking the whole thing apart. I can't imagine it being more than 250W though.) This coumpter currently has two HDD attached to it C: & D: (both are 20 GB).
CDRW ???
DVD ROM
Geforce 2 DDR 64MB
Soundblaster 16

How do you use event viewer? I've never used it.

 

Hi DeadDireWolf,
Using a power supply wattage caculator it turns out that a second hard drive puts you several watts over 250, if you want to use more than one hard drive you should get another larger power supply. I'd guess that the power supply is not working at peak preformance anymore and thats why it cant power both the hard drives anymore.

 

Thanks JJ.

I have a quetion now. Why would that hard drive cause the issue to occur in my wife's computer (as the 2nd drive) and not have the issue with the current 2nd drive that is installed? I'm afraid I don't know much about the power draw from devices.

That would be great if it's the power supply and not a bad hard drive. I'll check it out.

 

I hooked the slave drive from my wife's computer to mine and everything works beautifully. So is it possible that power is still an issue? I'm having problems with a Seagate 40 GB and the current slave is an WD 20 GB. I'll run memtest here in a few minutes.

 

Thanks for your help Tim.

Yes, both drives are jumpered for slave. The Seagate (the problem drive) has always been in the machine as slave for a few years and has never had the slightest indication of a problem until now. I've never touched it or changed any settings. I don't see how in this case it could be a power issue if another drive works when all else is equal. Memtest is also reporting zero errors since its been running.

 

Okay, I got the thing to boot with my original bad drive installed. I think it may have been baving the same way the whole time I was just getting impatient with it after the windows splash screen when it would load the desktop right away.

I set both drives to cable select this time and booted the machine. My wife needed something so I had to go upstairs and help her. I came back about 15 minutes later and it displayed the logon screen. So I logged on and I noticed that it was back to behaving very very slow. It loaded the desktop eventually and the HDD lLED never turns off. I clicked the start menu to check to see if the D: was recognized in My Computer and I'm still waiting for it to open up. So, it's now sort of working. It boots wiith the drive installed but runs so slow it's useless.

I'm still waiting for it to tell me if the drive is there. If it is, then i'll try to move everything off of it and get it out of there. It's been five minutes.

 

Download Seatools Desktop, create floppy or CD iso (which you have to burn of course), boot from it and diagnose the drive. Maybe it's just malfunctioning.

 

It's found a bunch of bad sectors. It reports them as Usage Unknown. does SeaTools repair those sectors like Norton's Disk Doctor or does it just wipe the stuff out and you lose the data?

 

Hi there,
Just a guess here but you may wanna check to see if maybe you have a bent or broken pin on the hd. I just recently broke a pin and now I have the same symptoms as you but I'm not able to boot at all. I did some research and read that a pin that may not be totally broken may boot eventually but will give you the same problems you are having. But I would suggest before you pull the hd off, back up any info on that drive in case you are not able to get it to boot again.
Good luck!
Sandy

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check.

That's exactly my problem, i'm trying to back up my data and I'm unable to do so. I just use SeaTools to check and "repair" the drive. The machine now boots okay and runs normally with the problem drive attachec. HOWEVER, Seatools seems to have "repaired" sectors so that Windows now says the disk needs formatted and is unaccessable by Windows. Does anyone know if it is now possible to recover the data or am I screwed?

 

It could -- but more likely, the system will just run at the speed of the slower RAM. I think this factor is unlikely if the machine was running satisfactorily before.

 

That sounds to me like the BIOS was having trouble interrogating the drive during the POST to find out what geometry settings to use. And got bad data, forcing you to have to re-set the CMOS. One possibility is the drive's electronics have gone sour.

But there's another possibility. You've found the drive has bad sectors. That's not a good sign, but you know that already. If a sector in the engineering cylinder went bad, the drive could have lost or corrupted setup or diagnostics information. If the former, your BIOS may now be running the drive with different geometry settings. If those settings in your CMOS have changed for the drive, try setting the drive up manually with the original settings. But if you mess with the CMOS settings, DON'T write to the drive until you know you can read your data from it.

However, if SeaTools did a low-level format on the drive, your data may be toast, short of a very expensive recovery job by one of the companies that do that sort of stuff.

 

Hey thanks Rob.

I think everything is okay now. Sort of anyway. The drive had bad sectors and, like Rob suggested, was goofing the whole thing up. I used to SeaTools to "repair" those bad sectors. Afterward, however, the drive was still unreadable by windows but , and better yet, it was recognized. That finally allowed me to run some recovery software on it. GetBack Data seems to have done the trick. It's found everything on the bad drive that's important to me and I'm in the process of copying it over and burning it off.

When I'm finished I'm gonna do a low level format and see how it does. Or I trash it and get a new one. Thank you everyone for the help and suggestions.

 

Bad sectors in today's hard drives is not a good sign. For some years, manufacturers have been using technology that allows the drive to identify a bad sector, mark it out of the allocation table, and substitute a spare sector in its place. When bad sectors start turning up, it has run out of spare sectors.

Watch that drive carefully. It may be on its way south. Run a surface check regularly and frequently. If the bad sector count starts to increase, replace the drive as quickly as you can. And keep your backups current.

If a sector goes bad under an important file, you've lost that file unless you're good with a sector editor and can fill in what was on the damaged sector.

If you're conservative, or if the data on the drive is important, don't wait for an increasing bad-sector count. Replace the drive.