hard drive failure?

M

mark2000

Geek Trainee
hi

I found a 8gig seagate harddrive in a old box of mine and I did not no what was on it so I installed it on my machine which is a

athlon 1400
ati9700 pro
512 ddr
win me
40 gig hard drive

when I had installed the 8 gig drive, it said boot drive failure and would not boot up, I went back to my normal drive which is a 40 gig and that would not boot up! it worked fine before I installed the old drive and I have checked all the connecters and there is power getting to the hard drive but it won't boot up.

I set the cmos to defaults to see if it would boot and then amend the cmos after I got it running but it will not boot at all.

How can I have caused this by just trying another drive in it?

any thoughts?
 
Your power supply might be right on the edge with that powerful equipment and the addition of the 2nd hard drive may have been enough to suck too much power from the power supply, and thus cause a boot failure.

Also, having the IDE cable on backwards can screw things up.

To get it booting again, make sure the CMOS jumper is back in it's original position. Also try unplugging the power connector from the motherboard and then plugging it back in (make sure the power supply is turned off or unplugged before doing this). If that doesn't fly, remove the CMOS battery and leave it out for several hours to 24 hours and then put it back in.
 
thanks Big B for replying

I tried everything you said and everything I could find on the net and nothing worked, so I went back to basics, First thing I tried was a different ribbon cable and it worked!

my normal 40 gig hard drive works with the new cable but the other 8gig drive does not, so i think that one is dead.

I must have damaged the ribbon cable while installing/removing!

how frustrating to spend 4 hours trying everything to find that its just the ribbon cable.

anyway its fixed now

thanks for the suggestions though, I have found the net and forums like these to be a gold mine of information for pc freaks like myself.

see ya
 
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