Hard-drive, or something else...?

The S.M.A.R.T. detector recently went-off on my hard-drive, & my computer would reset during WindowsXP boot-up, so I figured the drive to be defunct, & went out & bought a new one.

The BIOS seemed to recognize the new drive just fine; recognized the full 160Gig's & everything. I guess my WindowsXP 2002 edition isn't SP-1, so it only recognized 137Gig's of it, but it seemed to install just fine.

Then, after I reset it once, I couldn't get WindowsXP to load again. I kept receiving different error messages during WindowsXP boot-up that caused my computer to abort loading Windows.

I tried re-formatting & re-installing Windows, but now the system hangs as soon as I click Enter to install it.

So, my question is, could it be possible that my brand-new drive is also faulty, or is this something else entirely? &, if so, what? All of these seemingly random problems are making it difficult to troubleshoot or narrow anything down. I honestly have no idea where to go from here.

This is my current configuration:
Intel P4 2.2GHz "NorthWood" CPU
ASUS P4S333-M ACPI BIOS revision 1007 mother-board
SeaGate 160GB, Ultra DMA100, 8MB buffer, 7200RPM (new hard-drive)
512MB's RAM (Kingston)
GeForce XFX 5200 AGP8x 256MB DDR RAM
&, of course, WindowsXP (Home Edition Upgrade)

old hard-drive:
80GB IBM DeskStar MIC mobile rack hard-drive

 

Hi Vektor,

It's not nice to get problems with a replacement piece of hardware.
Suggestions:
Swap the IDE (ribbon) cables if they are both 80 pin (lead) types or borrow another to try. This will also reseat the cables if one of the connections has worked loose.
Go to the BIOS settings and check that the heads/cylinders listing for the drive are correct. If there is an Autodetect Drive section in the BIOS use that. (Check the Seagate setup instructions)
Reset the BIOS to "default settings ".
I think the Seagate disk utility DiskWizard has a method for preparing the drive for Win XP.
Failing those, I would look at upgrading the BIOS, otherwise there may be problem with the motherboard itself. Doubtful that you have one bad drive after another.

Matt

 

Hey MattMan. Thanx for all of your responses to my on-going problem.

Nah, this problem has really freaked me out now. Not only is it stuff that I'm generally unfamiliar with, (believe it or not, in my 15 years of what I would consider to be heavy computer use, I have never had a hard-drive fail on me,) but I replace what I'm `sure' is the problem and start from scratch, basically, & I'm still experiencing seemingly random errors.

I believe I'm actually using my old IDE cables because when I 1st used the new ones, (the ones that came with the new drive,) it wouldn't recognize the drive. I have no idea why. So, yeah; I might try that again.

I'm fairly certain that the BIOS heads/cylinders listing is correct. It seemed to automatically detect my hard-drive fine. Like I said, when I look at the BIOS, it even detected the full capacity of the drive. It's my version of WindowsXP that couldn't detect the full capacity.

I tried installing WindowsXP again last nite, & it inexplicably worked. I let the Windows XP installation (fully) format the 137Gig segment, & it installed fine again. I've reset, turned-off, & restarted the computer a few times since then with no problems.
Now here's my dilemma: do I continue normally, installing the up-dates & the rest of my hardware normally, in hopes that it will continue to work? Or, now that I have WindowsXP up & running again, (at least for the time-being,) is there something else I should do? I just can't help but feeling that if I proceed like nothing's wrong that I'm `ignoring' some sort of problem that's going to come back & bite me in the @$$ sooner-or-later...

 

I have a machine with a motherboard that was given to me by a friend. It is having problems with the drives. My next step is to flash/upgrade the BIOS, but with problems with the floppy drive I think i will try running the flash program from a bootable CD. What else I am going to do is upgrade the PSU (I got that too), it is only a generic type. You may wish to check out your PSU (first off, is the wattage adequate, you would probably need 350 watts) and whether the problems may be starting there.

You could install Windows, but do not expect it to be be reliable until you find the cause of the problems. After you get Windows running OK, install the chipset/motherboard drivers, then the video drivers, then upgrade DirectX, then install other drivers. If it seems to run well, do a Ghost or Drive image if you have one of those programs. If you need to format and reinstall later it may save you most of a days work.

That's mainly what I can think of at the moment. Let us know your progress and if you can spot something that may lead us to the cause.

Matt

 

I do have trouble turning-on my machine after I shut-down completely. Sometimes I have to hit the power button several times before it will start. I believe it's 350 watts. I actually just purchased it earlier this year because my last one burned-out. A friend of mine put it in for me, tho, so I'll double-check that as well as the connections.

Well, I installed Windows XP, put in the modem, & downloaded & installed SP-2 successfully so far. No problems so far except for a couple failed attempts at downloading the massive 90MB file on a dial-up connection. I'll start installing all of the drivers, cards, peripherals, & possibly some programs tonite.

Keep your fingers crossed for me. Thanx again, Matt.

 

Okay. I'm a little scared now, cuz I've always been told that if your system is working properly, (which mine is debateable at this point,) don't mess with your mo-bo & cpu drivers even if there's a newer version, & I have no idea what any of this stuff is. I know what drivers are, & how to install them, but I don't know, like, what a "SiS Mini IDE Driver" is, or if I should be messing with that stuff. Is that the cable? & what are the "SiS AGP WHQL Drivers "? Are those for my video-card? So should I dl those?

Here are the links to what I found for my system:

mo-bo drivers
http://www.asus.com/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=P4S333

cpu drivers
http://downloadfinder.intel.com/scr...SFullName=Windows*+XP+Home+Edition&submit=Go!

 

Hi Vektor. Those Intel/CPU downloads are only test utilities. You don't need them.

The motherboard/chipset drivers are ones at Asus. You have a SIS chipset. Under the Drivers tab download and install the latest version (ie., audio version 2.88 for Win XP, version 2.04a for IDE, 1.16b for LAN and 1.17 for display). As I said, after installing those make sure it runs OK, or uninstall and try again, or try a lower version. (XP made a hash of my drivers when I first installed it.)

SP2 seems to still be causing some trouble. I am not going to install it until all the bugs are ironed out. I rarely visit the XP forum, but see what they are saying there about SP2. (I use 98SE and like a good fight with the invasive junk )

Some experiences I've had with disappearing drives:
Some optical drives only like to be in a certain IDE location (eg master on the secondary IDE channel). I've seen them make other drives invisible.

I've seen drives disappear because of corrupt Dynamic Drive Overlays. If the IBM drive might have the Ontrack drive overlay (a blue framed screen pops up at boot asking if you want to boot from floppy), it may be causing the problem. They can also corrupt the MBR (master boot record) of other drives because they need to change the other drive's "view" so that they can be seen. Solution here is to rerun the Ontrack program (disconnect your new drive), although you may still get the SMART problem (check all through your motherboard manual for ways to disable it, it might be hidden in one of the sub-menus or see if the Disk Manager program might be able to disable it)

Matt

 

If you are sure the motherboard is generally ok do this:

Buy a RAID controller card. They are not expennsive and will have built in BIOS support for the large drives. Read the instructions that come with it as you have to do an extra step during Windows setup at the start [F6 Key] to provide a driver [on floppy disk] for setup to be able to detect the RAID hosted drive.

But thats not all you can get out of the RAID. Later on whenever you can afford it, you can add a second drive (of same capacity and brand works best) and run a "Mirror" with the RAID for downtime prevention as the PC using the RAID writes to 2 disks at a time, so if one dies the other boots the PC

Or you can "Stripe" 2 drives, where it writes across the 2 drives and treats them as 1 big drive. It enables the fastest inside sectors to be written for twice as long before getting to slower areas, and also 2 drives can work on the same task at the same time. With striped RAIDs you get an average 30-50% throughput improvement on your hard disk, making you whole PC much faster.

RAIDs are a good way of getting new drive support when your motherboard cant do it properly. Also, if you didnt have SATA on your motherboard, you could buy a SATA RAID controller to get 2 bootable SATA ports.

RAIDs also take the work of running the drives off the motherboard and even a single drive on a RAID will make your PC a bit faster, especially if the RAID supports higher speeds than your motherboard does, which is often the case.

As for the issue of pre SP1 not supporting 160GB, i havent seen that cause a problem yet and you could always put SP1 update on.

Giddyup

 

Good point Dez (Bradley). Could bypass problems on the motherboard. Can add RAID and SATA capabilities. Could overcome the 4 drive IDE limitation. Can be transferred to other machines in the future.


Matt