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The weirdest computer problem I have ever seen (help!)
Misanthropic
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
The story:
My mother's computer was having trouble, so I took it to fix it. I narrowed down the trouble it was having to a hard drive that was acting funny, so I pulled it. After that it worked perfectly.
Okay, cool. Or not.
Alas, I was wondering if it was actually the hard drive at all... so I decided to pop it into my computer. It's just a regular old SATA drive. Pop it in, go to BIOS make sure it's all detected and good. Cool. Reboot... POST, okay good, shows me all the drives and controllers etc. okay good, and then nothing. Shit.
The thing is, it made my *other* hard drive unbootable. Even after taking the weird drive out, my computer will POST but won't boot of the drive and will intermittently not even recognize a drive in there at all, even from the BIOS. Okay, weird.
I mess around with it a while and realize that there is a jumper on the drive. I have an "ah-ha!" moment and realize I'm an idiot. Remove that, put it back in, switch the SATA ports around (just in case) go into BIOS, set up the drives. At this point I just decide to do a clean install of Windows. Boot off Windows CD. Set up runs, sees the drives. Delete partition, create partition. Install runs. Cool. And then... it will either freeze or blue screen. And this is the original, completely fine drive.
So I pull the weird drive and go through all the motions with just the good drive in and the same thing happens.
So, to recap, it will either:
Fail to recognize either drive
or
recognize the drive and not allow Windows to install on it
or
allow Windows to install on it but not boot off it.
This happens independent of which SATA port they are plugged into.
Once, randomly, after five attempts I got windows installed and it would actually boot on the drive, but I couldn't save anything to the drive. I couldn't download anything, install any programs, anything.
This computer was running 100% fine before I put the weird drive in it.
I even went so far as to sled the drives, format them in FAT from my Macbook Pro, then go into bootcamp and format them in NTFS, and then plug them into the computer in question. The same thing keeps happening.
Any ideas? I've tried pretty much every BIOS setting possible, from SATA settings all the way to HT settings...
My mother's computer was having trouble, so I took it to fix it. I narrowed down the trouble it was having to a hard drive that was acting funny, so I pulled it. After that it worked perfectly.
Okay, cool. Or not.
Alas, I was wondering if it was actually the hard drive at all... so I decided to pop it into my computer. It's just a regular old SATA drive. Pop it in, go to BIOS make sure it's all detected and good. Cool. Reboot... POST, okay good, shows me all the drives and controllers etc. okay good, and then nothing. Shit.
The thing is, it made my *other* hard drive unbootable. Even after taking the weird drive out, my computer will POST but won't boot of the drive and will intermittently not even recognize a drive in there at all, even from the BIOS. Okay, weird.
I mess around with it a while and realize that there is a jumper on the drive. I have an "ah-ha!" moment and realize I'm an idiot. Remove that, put it back in, switch the SATA ports around (just in case) go into BIOS, set up the drives. At this point I just decide to do a clean install of Windows. Boot off Windows CD. Set up runs, sees the drives. Delete partition, create partition. Install runs. Cool. And then... it will either freeze or blue screen. And this is the original, completely fine drive.
So I pull the weird drive and go through all the motions with just the good drive in and the same thing happens.
So, to recap, it will either:
Fail to recognize either drive
or
recognize the drive and not allow Windows to install on it
or
allow Windows to install on it but not boot off it.
This happens independent of which SATA port they are plugged into.
Once, randomly, after five attempts I got windows installed and it would actually boot on the drive, but I couldn't save anything to the drive. I couldn't download anything, install any programs, anything.
This computer was running 100% fine before I put the weird drive in it.
I even went so far as to sled the drives, format them in FAT from my Macbook Pro, then go into bootcamp and format them in NTFS, and then plug them into the computer in question. The same thing keeps happening.
Any ideas? I've tried pretty much every BIOS setting possible, from SATA settings all the way to HT settings...
Misanthropic on
0
Posts
MOM!
2: Problems with south bridge controller on motherboard? I've seen similar problems installing windows on a machine where a shorted USB cable fried the south bridge (south bridge handles low speed communication like USB and SATA).
The MB behaving different after you removed the other HD points to this.
For your sake I hope it's not since that's a broken MB.