Problem with Hitachi Deskstar

Night · 9 Jun 2006 at 18:43

Hi guys bit of a problem just cropped up and wonder if you can help me out. I was using my computer fine earlier today and then all of a sudden music started to pause and distort.

I thought it was simply my computer was overheating and as such shut it down which went through fine.

When I came back to turn the computer on a fe mins ago I got a no master IDE harddrive detected. So I unplugged the two harddrives I have and the dvd rom drive and installed the hitachi drive which has my xp installation on onto the primary ide channel. I checked and all jumpers were set correctly and rebooted the system.

This time when the computer launched it detected the drive but through up a problem ntldr missing press ctrl-alt-del to restart.

Ive tried reinstalling windows but get a no harddrive detected message any help is much appreciated.

SiriusB · 9 Jun 2006 at 20:40

Uh oh, sounds like your HDD is dead or dying! I hope you kept backups.

To find out for sure if your drive is borked go here: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm#DFT and download the Drive Fitness Test.

Burn or write it to a floppy and boot from it. It will have tools to scan your HDD to see if there any errors and such. If it does throw up an error note it down along with any error codes. You may need these codes for your RMA application.

SiriusB

Night · 9 Jun 2006 at 22:11

thanks for the help SiriusB i'll get on to that in the morning. Thing is can I survive the night on an ancient laptop lol.

t31os · 10 Jun 2006 at 12:40

Doesnt sound like the HDD screwed to me, i've had this happen a couple of times in my years, and in all the instances i remember the HDD has not dead or didnt die, try checking out some of the links here.

ns400r · 10 Jun 2006 at 22:42

You need to watch some of the older Deskstar drives.
They weren't renamed DEATHSTARS for nothing.
There was quite a spate of failures with IBM labeled ones at one time.

Night · 11 Jun 2006 at 13:08

Yeh I did a bit of digging that night on my laptop and after some tinkering the next morning. I got the drive working on the ide channel that the dvd drive is on so I either have a duff IDE cable or the silicon image chip on the motherboard is dead. But the drive does work so thankfully havent had to call in the legions of cd's I have stuff stored on.