PC help?

[Venix]

Just to get it out of the way, yes it is an old PC, but I have a new one, and this one is just the one I keep at the house for storage and light gaming.

Anyway:

Ive been having hard drive issues for the past 2 months. Being one to not want to risk it, I got a new hard drive right away. I however, can not make one work. After trying the first two I bought, returning them, and now on my 3rd one, Im thinking its not the HDD thats the issue, but something with my PC. Its an older model PC (2002) non-SATA, and has lots of upgrades that ive done over the years.

*The description:
My current (old and dying) HDD will still boot up, still run windows, and any app I want to run, it is just going out and being very loud about it. Whenever I hook up a new HDD in addition to the current one (on the slave side) the pc will not even boot. Power will turn on, the HDDs will spin, all the lights and fans power up, but I get no signal to the monitor. If I just disconnect the power to the new HDD everything goes back to normal and works fine. As I said above, this is the 3rd HDD I have tried and second brand. The Tech support for the HDD companys is super crappy as they only work for 4-6 hours a day and only in the morning most of the week. If anyone has any ideas as to what the issue could be feel free to let me know.

*What ive done:
I have moved jumpers several times
I have tried to boot from the single new drive
I have tried to give it more power by turning off all of my fans
I have gone insane because i dont know what is wrong

*PC specs:
2002 VPR Matrix Series 210 Model FT-6100
Intel D845EBT Motherboard
ATI 9600 pro video card
Western Digital 100gb HDD (current/old)
230w stock Power supply
2.53gh pent 4

New drive: 500gb Seagate PATA/100 16mb cache

 

[saleen09]

So are you trying to add the new drive and then move all of your data over?

I would suggest unplugging the IDE cable from your optical ( CD/DVD) drive and plugging the new hard drive into that. Make sure the hard drive jumper is set to "master" or "cable select". This also will be MUCH faster than moving data in between drives on the same IDE cable.

Let me know if that works.

 

[JDStud6]

when you take out the old HD and put the new one in as MASTER, what happens then?

JD

 

[thomas91169]

i usually do it all through windows. i always have boot priority issues otherwise.

install the drive into the PC, plug in the power but not the data cable. then boot up, then once windows is up i plug in the data cable and let windows see the new drive and install whatever it needs to do.

im ghetto, but if i do otherwise, i always have bios startup issues, disk read errors, "cannot find OS" errors and shit like that.

 

[Search]

On the back of the hard drive, is it set to slave or master or whatever those things say? Sorry it's too late for my mind to think. My contacts are so dry I can barely see the words.

Make sure your IDE cables are on right things and actually work. Make sure you haven't messed up the pins.

Go into your bios and check to make sure everything looks good. It shouldn't be too overly complicated to guess at what looks right and what doesn't.

Windows doesn't like the Hard Drive your trying to use. Even if it was corrupted it should boot off of the HD that you know, has windows. So it's either not a compatible hard drive, or your hooking it up wrong, or something isn't right in the bios.

I'm probably totally wrong.

 

[NyteByte]

I would suggest unplugging the IDE cable from your optical ( CD/DVD) drive and plugging the new hard drive into that. Make sure the hard drive jumper is set to "master" or "cable select". This also will be MUCH faster than moving data in between drives on the same IDE cable.

Best advice IMO.

Also, if your drives are PATA and not SATA, you should NOT try to plug one of them in with the system already powered up.

Your motherboard has four PATA connectors. If you can't get it working on the either the black or white connectors, try the blue ones. The blue connectors are on a separate RAID controller and should be isolated from the main controller.

And as it was mentioned before, make sure you're plugging the cable in the right way.

 

[Venix]

sorry for the last responce, pc being down makes it hard to check email =). It ended up being the power supply. The 230w was just not enough to run everything. New 500w worked perfect. Now i just have to wait 6 days for the hdds to clone....

 

[Search]

6 days im so sorry for your loss

 

[JDStud6]

sorry for the last responce, pc being down makes it hard to check email =). It ended up being the power supply. The 230w was just not enough to run everything. New 500w worked perfect. Now i just have to wait 6 days for the hdds to clone....

You had a 230W PSU?? wow lol

JD

 

[JasonSnake]

try to always keep the PATA HD's on separate IDE channels as masters (in some cases Cable Select). Gauranteed for the transfer to be much quicker when cloning.

 

[YesterdayAgain]

Wow, first Cantoodler is back, now you. What gives?

 

[Venix]

try to always keep the PATA HD's on separate IDE channels as masters (in some cases Cable Select). Gauranteed for the transfer to be much quicker when cloning.

If it ends up failing or the power goes out or something dumb like that I will give this a try. I didnt think that would have much an impact, but I can see how it would. Thanks for the info.