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Hard drives not acting right

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by spm9928

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I recently came across a pc that had win 2000 on it and was continuing to reboot, go to scandisk and as 2000 was loading .. rebooted. I took the master hard drive (1 of 2 drives) and placed it in another unit and used partition magic to re-partion the drive to install a new operating system on the new partition, while maintaining the original faulty os on the main partition. When I placed the hard drive back in its original pc and started the pc it won;t boot. I get a hard drive error messege where it should say master, slave etc. Nor is the cd-rom recognized ( cd-rom is not atapi compatible). I even switched the ide cables, jumpers, and tried variuos combinations of the hard drive placement form master to slave and nothing works. I have gotten the messege to run setup. when I did that and had the bios automatically detect the hard drives... it list all dirves as being not installed. what do i do??

5 replies

by ghimpe--

The hard drive might be failing. Go to the Makers website and download the diagnostic utility. This should tell you if your hard drive is OK or FUBAR ;)

GooD LucK :D

by _christian_

It may also be that the boot sector is corrupted.
unless you had a backup of it (the boot sector), the only reliable way is to boot from an O/S installation CD, make sure that the drive is seen, erase everything on it, then let the O/S install as if on a brand new drive.
If it still fails after that, you drive is definitely FUBAR.

If it does not, it proves that the boot sector was corrupted, which could be either an early symptom of hard drive failure (statistically unlikely to have hit just the boot sector), or a boot sector corruption induced by a software (in one I witnessed happen, by Windows 2000 itself)

by hal 9000

Well firstly part of your problem is that loading another OS on a different M'Board installs different drivers to what may be required on the original M'Board. Then you have the problem of most likely not installing a Dual Boot option when you installed the second OS which you didn't mention what it was so even if it is accessible it might not be capable of booting as it isn't on the primary partition of the primary Drive.

Since the CD is not ATAPI what is it?

Also what type of system are you dealing with here a dedicated server or a workstation?

Also which version of 2000 are we talking about the desktop or Server version?

We really need to know this before we can properly answer your question.

If you would like to add this information I'm sure that some one here will be more than willing to help you out but never the less lets know what is going on and I'll at the very least try to help you.

Col

by spm9928

To explain further. The faulty os was win 2000 pro. The cd IS atapi compatible, but got an error message during post saying it wasn't. None of the hard drives, floppy drives or cd-roms operate. All are listed with errors and when I ran setup to detect them they were all listed as "not installed". I am starting to beleive that either my hard drive controllers have failed or I got a nasty virus that got in the bios. The client did say they were surfing the web for a week or two with NO VIRUS PROTECTION.

by absolutely

If the BIOS does not recognize IDE drives that are recognized on another system, you undoubtedly have some problem with the mobo's hard drive controller. Whether caused by a virus or fluke or burst of electromagnetic energy from Alpha Centauri, you need to flash the BIOS.

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