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A tale of Two Hard Drives
Fartacus_the_Mighty
Brought to youby the letter A.Registered User regular
Brought to youby the letter A.Registered User regular
I would have put this into the all-in-one computer thread, but it's a bit of a complicated problem.
I've got these two IDE hard drives, both 120gb, both about 4 years old. They've been running in my current rig for almost a year now, with no problems (along with 2 SATA drives, one of which is the boot drive). This morning, my machine refused to boot, and gave me a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION bsod.
After a bit of hunting on the net (with a second PC) I decided to try removing the IDE drives. This allowed me to boot into Windows. Through trial and error, I learned that only one of the drives was causing the crash. I left the other working one in. Going into safe mode would sometimes allow me to boot with the "faulty" drive in, but would crash when I tried to access it. Later, when I went to get something off the remaining IDE drive, I got the same crash. The second drive would allow booting with it connected, but would cause the crash whenever I tried to access it.
First, I tried changing the cable and then the IDE slot (unplugging the optical drives and putting the HDDs there), with the same predictable result. Next, I took one of the drives to the other, known-good PC, and it worked just fine. I thought it might be the motherboard, maybe it didn't like IDE hard drives any more (I just installed a new PSU, so anything's possible). I put an older 25gb drive in to test it in my rig, and it works perfectly. I reinstalled my old PSU in case that was the problem, but it didn't help. Lastly, I reset my BIOS to factory defaults and tried a repair installation of WinXP, both of which did not help. Oh, I tried swapping RAM, too.
So, the drives seem okay, the mobo seems okay, the OS seems okay, the PSU seems okay, and my RAM seems okay. And yet, the machine refuses to boot if I have those drives plugged in. Any suggestions?
I've got these two IDE hard drives, both 120gb, both about 4 years old. They've been running in my current rig for almost a year now, with no problems (along with 2 SATA drives, one of which is the boot drive). This morning, my machine refused to boot, and gave me a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION bsod.
After a bit of hunting on the net (with a second PC) I decided to try removing the IDE drives. This allowed me to boot into Windows. Through trial and error, I learned that only one of the drives was causing the crash. I left the other working one in. Going into safe mode would sometimes allow me to boot with the "faulty" drive in, but would crash when I tried to access it. Later, when I went to get something off the remaining IDE drive, I got the same crash. The second drive would allow booting with it connected, but would cause the crash whenever I tried to access it.
First, I tried changing the cable and then the IDE slot (unplugging the optical drives and putting the HDDs there), with the same predictable result. Next, I took one of the drives to the other, known-good PC, and it worked just fine. I thought it might be the motherboard, maybe it didn't like IDE hard drives any more (I just installed a new PSU, so anything's possible). I put an older 25gb drive in to test it in my rig, and it works perfectly. I reinstalled my old PSU in case that was the problem, but it didn't help. Lastly, I reset my BIOS to factory defaults and tried a repair installation of WinXP, both of which did not help. Oh, I tried swapping RAM, too.
So, the drives seem okay, the mobo seems okay, the OS seems okay, the PSU seems okay, and my RAM seems okay. And yet, the machine refuses to boot if I have those drives plugged in. Any suggestions?
Fartacus_the_Mighty on
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You aren't powering the drives from the same "strand" as the video card by any chance? Video cards make the power "dirty".
At night, the ice weasels come."
Thanks for the reply.
A repair install should replace all the drivers. Also, my video card is PciE and has its own power cord. I thought it might've been my new PSU that was giving my drives fits (though they've been working for a week w/no problem), but reinstalling the old one didn't help. I was thinking about the linux thing, maybe the drives would work fine if WinXP wasn't so anal.
I've got a new SATA drive and IDE enclosure ready to order from newegg in case I can't get them to work as is.