Rebuilt PC freezes on boot, failed disk?

MattU · 17 Mar 2008 at 23:14

I've just made a new desktop PC with bits from my media center, replacing the motherboard, RAM, processor (Asrock 960G, E4300, OCZ 4GB) - but keeping the same hard drive, a WD 320GB SATA drive.

When booting up the BIOS screen will show the hard drive as detected, but will freeze on the next line. I've tried with some 160gb Hitachi Deskstar drives and they work fine. I've installed windows on one of these now, but if I reconnect the WD drive I can't get past the first BIOS screen.

Does anyone know if this problem is solvable or is it a dead drive?

MattU · 18 Mar 2008 at 00:23

Thanks for the reply.

I don't think there are any RAID options on the BIOS. It's a mATX motherboard with pretty basic features. The other drives I've been using are also SATA so I think the port should work ok, it just seems to be this one drive.

There are a few other odd things going with the board though, such as CMOS Time/Date resetting to default a lot and popping up an message on boot, so still hoping the drive isn't dead.

MattU · 18 Mar 2008 at 09:51

Yeah, it's formatted in NTFS and has dual boot Vista and XP installs. Are all sata drives hot swappable? Could connect it to the eSATA port on my other computer if it is to see if it works there.

MattU · 18 Mar 2008 at 11:47

The problem is it doesn't even get past the first BIOS screen when it's plugged in, so not sure what I can do. It won't get as far as reading a floppy or a CD. There are a few things on the drive I haven't got backed up, so yeah I would like to recover it really.

MattU · 18 Mar 2008 at 18:43

There are jumpers on the drive - I think I've tried these in most configurations now, but the manual seems to state that they are unimportant apart from some enterprise functions.

I can't see any options for SATA1 on the motherboard, but the drive was previously used on an ASUS K8VSE D - which was certainly before SATA2. Would this cause a problem?

Going to try it in another PC now and see what happens.

MattU · 18 Mar 2008 at 19:15

Well, luckily the drive works in my media center and I've been able to get the data off. It sounds like the drive is failing though, there's a very loud grinding noise coming from it. I'm not sure what killed it, I didn't even take it out of the case.

Edit: Well, after copying 100GB data off the drive it was back to being quiet, reformatted and now it's working in my desktop pc. Still a bit confused about the cause, but can't complain now it's working fine

Thanks for the suggestions