PC crashed and hangs on detecting IDE drives

beardiedog

Help! My PC has just crashed and now I can't get past the 'Detecting IDE drives' message and can't get into setup. Anyone any ideas?

Thanks.

PROLIANT

beardiedog wrote: »

Help! My PC has just crashed and now I can't get past the 'Detecting IDE drives' message and can't get into setup. Anyone any ideas?

Thanks.

Check the connection to the drives and motherboard, if that fails unplug the drives and you should be able to gain access to the BIOS.

beardiedog

Thanks I'll give it a go and report back.

beardiedog

Pressed the IDE connectors and now it gets to the booting from CD prompt and hangs. Got into the BIOS and it's detecting the hard drive. Should I put the XP CD in and try a repair?

PROLIANT

beardiedog wrote: »

Pressed the IDE connectors and now it gets to the booting from CD prompt and hangs. Got into the BIOS and it's detecting the hard drive. Should I put the XP CD in and try a repair?

Ok, disconnect the CD ROM drive and see what happens.

beardiedog

This is weird. Tried allsorts, just rebooted for the umpteenth time and Windows started up. Very strange.

I'll recheck all connections and give it clean and see how it goes.

thor

The same thing happened to my ide drive. It used to fail once every few weeks but then one day it stopped working altogether, hanging at the ide detect stage. I shifted it around ide 0 and ide 1 connections but it never worked. I clone my drive regularly and I had one I could swap in and it worked immediately. So there was no doubt that it was kaput as I did not change anything else. I'm not sure from your last post if your comp is working now but even if it is, it might be a good idea to clone your hard drive should the worst happen(you should back up anyway)

beardiedog

thor wrote: »

The same thing happened to my ide drive. It used to fail once every few weeks but then one day it stopped working altogether, hanging at the ide detect stage. I shifted it around ide 0 and ide 1 connections but it never worked. I clone my drive regularly and I had one I could swap in and it worked immediately. So there was no doubt that it was kaput as I did not change anything else. I'm not sure from your last post if your comp is working now but even if it is, it might be a good idea to clone your hard drive should the worst happen(you should back up anyway)

Yes, it appears to be working OK now, it booted first time this morning no problem. I do back up all my important data each night to an external USB drive so I can carry on working on my laptop if needs be.

I'm a bit peed off with hard drives though, this is my third replacement in five years, current one is a Seagate, the two previous ones were Maxtor so I suppose it's understandable they carked as they were not considered very reliable.

Thanks for your input, I'll keep my eye on it and probably worth cloning it just in case, it will certainly save all the hassle of reinstalling everything again.

thor

Actually I rather rate seagates even though the one which failed was one of them. I had had it for 6 years and it has been used to death. I stored huge amounts of movies, mp3 and jpgs on it and performed countless encodings and deletes. As a result the drive became more and more fragmented so the read and write heads were whizzing all over the place. I kept meaning to defragment(I know there is a large body of opinion who think it is not worth the effort) but never got round to it. I suppose I was satisfied with just cloning the drive and this is what saved me. I have so much confidence in seagate that I have just bought another one.