one for the puter wizards (1 Viewer)

Hi All
I wonder if anyone can help me with this prob.
Briefly system consists of- win xp home,1.8ghz P4,384 ram,80ghz C drive with DVD drive as slave, CD drive with 20ghz H/Drive as slave.

OK this is the prob recently my puter has started freezing and the only way of getting out is hard switch off. Also now and then at switch on my CD drive and 20ghz hard drive are not detected also sometimes it is just the hard drive not detected.

If I remove 20ghz hard drive which is a fujitsu MPG3204 AT everything seems ok.

Conclusion hard drive gone wrong, but my diagnostic software (microscope ver 8, seagate ONTRACK using generic) says it is ok.

Any help appreciated.

Pete

Hi Pete,

Did you try to disconnect your CdDrive? and use only the 20 GB on your secondary IDE?
Or try a new cable on the IDE where's the 20 Gb HardDrive.
Or sometimes it goes wrong with the power suply try to switch the power connection.
These where only a few suggestions to tryout

Are your hard disks and CD/DVD drives set as Master and Slave or are they set as Computer Select? If CS try altering to Master/Slave.

Are the cables seated properly in the devices and the motherboard?

Try reversing the IDE connections on the motherboard and see if the computer recoginises the devices?

Try the hard disk and ROM in the opp. order set the salve to master and master to slave?

Try replacing the IDE cable?

Try setting the BIOS settings for the hard disk by hand instead of using AUTO?

Oh well, I tried. Maybe someone else has some suggestions?

Golfnut

The worms going around recently cause that, or very similar problems.
Try running the W32.Blaster and W32.Welcher removal tools downloadable from Symantec. here:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/index.html

Fujitsu had to recall a large number of 20GB drives because of a faulty chip not too long ago. You may well have oner of those, Pete. But first, change the cable.

After that, work your way through the excellent advice Jeff and Rades offer. The symptoms don't seem to match Alan's suggestion of the Blaster Worm, but make sure you have the patch applied anyway. Swap out the cable first: these things can often be cable-related. Also, try mixing and matching your IDE devices (both HDDs on the same cable, and so on). Several brands of optical drive have questionable compatibility.

DOH! I just noticed: you have the CD drive as master and the hard drive as slave. That is a problem right out of the box. Hard drives are IDE devices but CD drives are not: they are ATAPI devices, which is not the same thing. You can break this rule and get away with it quite often, but the rule is, never slave an IDE device (HDD) to a non-IDE device (optical drive). You can slave them the other way around, though.

Do that first - set the Fujitsu as master, the CD as slave. Then change the cable.

Thanks guys for all suggestions.

So far tried swapping cd to slave and hdd to master, on boot up no IDE devices detected HO HUM.

Swapped the ide cables HO HUM.

Get a new cable on thurs let you know how I get on.

Pete

UPDATE thurs 28 aug

Got a new ide cable swapped hdd to master and cd to slave as advised switch on xp starts to load gets to just before the welcome screen and goes blank. Hard switch off!!

Oh well this is further than I was getting now at least the drives are being detected.

Tried microscope diagnostics which tells me NTLDR is missing on suspect hdd.

Checked internet to see what this means and one of the fixes suggested to try is use xp recovery control.

OK but I can't get mine to fully load, so thought about it for a while then tried swapping hdd round and booting with xp disc.

This booted and installed xp on second hdd. Ok at least hdd is working again.

Swap hdd back again reboot voilla loaded ok re-format d: and looks like all ok.

Why it went wrong in the first place I'm not sure can only put it down to faulty ide cable.

Many thanks to Raydes, Jeff, Alan and Tannin for all your suggestions well done guys.

Pete