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hard drive failure

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by rickybrick

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My ecs elitegroup p4 mainboard with award bios incorrectly reports hard drive failure during the bios bootup sequence one in every five attempts.I can enter the bios and manually detect hard drive and this makes no difference if this is one of the times it has decided not to boot. Sometimes rebooting six or seven times will get me in.I'm afraid one of these days she wont boot at all. I have a P4 chip 512 mb ddr ram well ventilated case and a maxtor 7200 rpm 30gb hd

8 replies

by qballrail

The intermittent nature of this makes me suspect a connection problem. If the drive tests fine, check all your connections to it. In fact, reseat each of them. Perhaps replacing the interface cable might resolve. If this continues and the drive is still behaving this way, RMA it back to Maxtor. Also, if you can, just try another drive in its place. If it continues, you might have an IDE controller issue or connection on the mainboard.

One thing you might also want to try is gong back into the BIOS setup util and having it redetect the drive. Another option may be to set User Defined defaults for it.

Good Luck!

Regards,
Jesse

by qballrail

Side Note: Make sure all of your important data is backed up so you don't lose it permanently. When you have a successful boot, do that while you are up, in case that may be the last time you can boot successfully.

by opatzg9

I'll second the backup while you have it running.
If you're runnning windows 98se 512mb is a problem as well. The Chas has frequented the problems he's seen in this forum all the time. The last question I'ld have is your power supply good enough? 300w may be a little scimpy with the hardware and fans your running. Good Luck!

by deadly ernest

Another point to check would be that the harddrive is jumpered for 'Master' or 'Slave' whichever is relevant and not to 'Cable Select'. I have seen some systems have a problem with modern drives on 'Cable Select'. Not common but a bugger to detect the first time you see it happen.

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