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Crapped out hard drive

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11 replies

by jfradette

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This question may never produce a definitive answer, but let?s go for it.
This morning, I went to replace a CD-ROM drive in a users PC. This process went without a hitch. Afterward, I rebooted and was showing the user that that everything worked. Ithen noticed that the user had only 64M RAM. I then shut down the PC, installed an additional 64M RAM. Upon rebooting, the BIOS counted up all 128M of RAM without any errors, but the PC failed to start. I ran (the non-destructive) WD Diags and determined the HD was fine. I then went to run the WinNT setup CD to attempt to repair the files, assuming they were somehow corrupt. The WinNT setup utility ran for a bit then informed me that there was no operating system to repair. The util told me something akin to the drive appears to be a new unformatted drive, do I want to ? I then installed the drive into another PC as the slave drive, ran Disk Manager only to find the entire drive was unallocated.
Besides ESD, (which I don?t believe to be an issue here) what could have, would have caused the entire drive to be wiped clean just by installing additional RAM?

11 replies

by dmiles

I donot suspect that memory would do this to the hard drive
Inadvertently sometning went wrong using the diagnostics

by edsdave

If you pull the extra RAM out will it reboot?
If so, check to see that both pieces of RAM are same frequency and if different place slow RAM in first slot then faster RAM in second.

by jfradette

The first thing I did was to remove the RAM. The PC still failed to boot. The SIMM's / DIMM's are identical to the original RAM. I didn't try different DIMM slots, there were only two available (free)(of 4 total) slots, I used them. Just anFYI, I've since began rebuilding the drive, in it's original "host" PC with the additional RAM and the original HDD

by thechas

Here's my 2 cents worth.

I suspect that the new RAM was incompatable with the motherboard, and corrupted the virtual device drivers.

(I have 2 DIMMs that did this for me until I found a motherboard that they would work in. The RAM counts up fine in POST, but will not function in Windows.)

Then, running the diagnostics with the incompatable RAM in place caused the FAT, MBR, or Partition table to be erased.

Chas

by jfradette

See my comments in answer #2. The RAM was pulled from an identical system and was working when removed. You're actually thinking along the same lines as I am.

I'm beginning to think that GOD is paying me back for a witty comment that I had made just moments earlier to that user. Hmmm, shoulda kept my thots to myself.

Altho the RAM was seated fully, I didn't blow-out (dust) the MB, perhaps something was shorting a contact or two in the DIMM slot.

A continuance of #2 The PC is (as I type) coming back to life just fine using the same suspect additional RAM / original HDD, but fresh, new format & OS. No probs as yet!

Thanx for the input,

by rjbaker

A stray voltage spike could have caused a minute hiccup in the read-write heads which could have wiped a portion of the partition sector.
regards

by jfradette

Knowing from the onset that this question would never render a definitive answer and since your answer seems about the most plausible, I'll reward you the points. BTW, the system is now running fine, complete w/the original HDD, the orig RAM +PLUS+ the additional suspect RAM. No problems have been reported by the user. Matter-o-fact, the user has never even commented as to whether or not she's noticed any performance differences since installing the additional 64M of RAM. There should be a lesson learned here, about 'if it ain't broke...' but I know that I'll get bit again someday, cuz that's my nature, to try to help people even when they don't seek my help. What can I say?

Thanx for participating in my "experiment" Jeff F.

by borginva

I think it was the RAM port. If it was bad, anything bad would happen. I have a PC at hoe with 4 memory slots. I had 32M chips in each one but then I was getting hard drive and boot errors. I removed chip 4 and it still did not work. I removed chip 3 and the system is fine. After more tests, I found slot 4 is bad, but in this system, slot 2 needs to have slot 1 filled, and 4 needs to have slot 3 filled. So I had to go on 64M from 128.
So if the memory slot on your system went bad, it would ahve done some sort of damage, and if you machine needs slot 1 filled before you can use slot 2, it would be real hard to diagnose the memory slot.

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