Rebuilt PC freezes on boot, failed disk?

MattU

MattU

MattU

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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?
 
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I remember having problems with sata drives on my old msi neo2, I think that I had to turn off raid in the bios for all drives so that I could install an os on the drive - are their any raid options in the bios?
 
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.
 
have you tried putting in a new cmos battery? Not sure if this will have much affect on the hdd problem, but would explain the time/date resetting.
 
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.
 
Are you trying to boot into the WD drive? As in boot to the O/S...

Chances are if you have changed the motherboard etc then the drive might have trouble booting to the O/S anyway as its a different setup.

But from what I read its freezing before it tries to boot yeah? Do you need the data that is on the drive? If not then you could try formatting the drive. Either with the XP boot disk (or any other relevant O/S disk) Or boot to an A: prompt and use Fdisk to format the old partitions.
 
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.
 
You could try a different SATA cable...The drive might just be being picky for some silly reason...Or even on a different port on the motherboard.
 
drive issue

Are there any jumpers on the drive itself?

Does the motherboard have a SATA1 / SATA2 switch option. If it is set to
SATA2 try swapping to SATA1.

If it still won't boot you could find a cheap USB drive caddy to turn it into a USB device. Then boot windows without it in and try to plug it in once the OS is loaded, get the data off you need, format / fdisk the drive and try it again.

Also try the drive in another PC, try a different power lead, try a different SATA lead or try a different SATA port.
 
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.
 
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 :)
 
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