PC Evaluation

I'm currently evaluating a PC I'm thinking about buying from a friend. He was having problems with errors and not being able to reload Win ME. The board is by Asus and has 512 MEG of DDR ram installed. The processor is an AMD Thunderbird 1.4 GHz. The system is about 6-7 years old but would work great for an application I have in mind. Hard drive is a Seagate (120 G) about 2 years old. I partitioned (FDISK) and reformatted the drive with no problem. I started to load Win XP Pro and it took several hours finally ending with a blue screen (after several normal system restarts) saying there were multiple errors and Windows could not continue loading. I had an old drive with Win 95 on it and I replaced the existing drive with this one. When I started the computer everything ran normal and updated just like it should. Win 95 runs great and the system seems to be OK.

At this point is it safe to assume that the hard drive is the problem or should I try to start from scratch with a known good hard drive?

Thanks in advance,
D.

 

Since errors are found using both Win ME and Win XP, there does seem to be something wrong with the HDD. I would suspect bad sectors first, but I never rule out problems in the MBR/Boot Sector.

If it has one or two bad sectors you may be able to mark them as bad and be able to use the drive as "unstable" storage system (because the bad sectors will continue to grow and take the data with them). You would need to set the drive as slave to another HDD with Windows on it and run Scandisk/Error Checking on the drives of the problem HDD.

You can run the HDD manufacturer's utilities on the HDD. That should tell you what is wrong with it (although only Windows will be able to mark sectors as bad) and you should be able to run a Low-Level (Zero) format which will completely wipe the drive, including the Boot Sector and remove any possible problems there.

It would be a shame to throw away a perfectly good drive that may have a corrupt MBR (the Master Boot Records in the Boot Sector) or incorrect partitioning information.

If you need help, post back with the make and model of the HDD and we could point you to the manufacturer's utilities.

Matt

 

Thanks Matt. The drive in question is a Seagate ST3120026A. I started the system up again last night and no drives were recognized. I didn't have time to play with it but tonight I'll check the power supply. I will have more time on Friday (day off) to investigate a little further. Any other thoughts or ideas are welcome.

Thanks again,
D.

New developement..............Hard drives are not showing up in bios now. I checked the power connectors to the drives and they are getting power. I'm thinking this doesn't look good. Any thoughts would be helpful.

Thanks again,
D.

 

Sounds like you have both drives connected, but the jumper settings are wrong. If you have both drives on the same cable, one will need to be jumpered as master, the other slave or both can be jumpered as CS (Cable Select), then the drive at the end of the cable becomes the master.
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Go to the download section at Seagate and get the Diskwizard and Seatools utilities. Seatools has testing utilities, Diskwizard has setup and formatting utilities (and the zero format utility). Run the the tests in Seatools, that will, within reason, tell you what is wrong with the drive (it will probably even tell you about the drive not showing in the BIOS). You can use Diskwizard to do the partitioning and formatting (if you want a FAT32 file system, tell it you are installing ME or 98). Do not install a "Dynamic Drive Overlay" if you see it. In Diskwizard, in the Maintenance Options, run "Backup (or restore) the MBR ", having a backup of the MBR may prove useful in the future. As I said, do not install the (Ontrack) Dynamic Disk Overlay. Use the other options to partition and format.

Matt

 

Very good. This will be tonight’s activity. On connecting the drives, I had the one with Win 95 set as the master and at the end of the cable. The other drive was set CS. There was no option for slave. When this didn't work I disconnected the Seagate drive and reset the Win 95 drive to single drive. This still didn't work. I didn't have time to check the cable but tonight I'll have a look. I can't imagine what I did but I hope it was something simple.

Thanks again,
D.

 

Installation guide:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/iguides/ata/cuda7200ig.pdf

With all the movement of the cables you may need to disconnect the cable at the motherboard and reseat it. The connections of the secondary IDE cable should be reseated as well.

If I want to set up two drives for one to run tests on the other I often leave them set as master and put the second drive as master on the secondary IDE cable. Usually this is where the optical drives are connected so you just take the cable from the optical drive and connect it to the HDD (no CD access while you are testing).

In the BIOS settings, look for a menu "Autodetect hard disk drives" you may need to run this when you have made changes.

Have you gotten the Diskwizard and Seatool utilities? (Make the DOS based floppy boot disks).
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=51e092db8a13d010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
You should only need to set the Seagate drive as single master and run the utilities (boot to the floppy disk).

Matt

 

All right. I'm back again. I downloaded the software from Seagate and ran the Seatools disk (also checked memory). I ran the quick and the full scan and all came back "green" no errors. I'm running Disk Wizzard now and formating the Seagate drive to run Win XP Pro (no overlay). By the way I had the cables connected backwards on the hard drives (to much of a hurry). I'll reply back when I have some news,

Thanks,
D.

 

Everything "green ", sounds promising. Actually, I have the exact same drive and have not had an ounce of trouble with it, in fact I marvel sometimes at how well it works.

If you did get errors again I would do the Zero format. The only other possibility I could think of was a scratched or dirty installation CD.

Luck
Matt

 

I'm doing the zero format over night and will try to load Win XP tomorrow or whenever the zero format is done (this is really moving slow). I have another system to work on as well so I can work on that system in the meantime. I'll post back with results.

Thanks again,
D.

Update: Ran the zero format and all went well. Saved MBR and turned the machine off for a while. I took a real good look at the board and got a little more familiar with the jumper and cable setings. I discovered that the IDE active cable was connected to some messaging pins. I put it where it belonged. I found the RAM voltage set to max, I reset it to default (lowest). I think these were all the things I found out of place. I reset the BIOS for DVD boot and proceeded to load WIN XP PRO with no apparent problems. If you have any other comments, suggestions or ideas please feel free to post.

Thanks so much for your help,
D.