Hard Disk Failure

naturals

Hi guys - I think the hard disk in my PC may have died. It won't boot to Windows but there is no message coming up on the screen or anything. I've tried putting a new graphics card in and a new monitor but without luck.

If I were to put the 'knackered' HD into another PC would that mess it up (given it has an OS on it)? There is a light on the underside of the HD so I know that power is reaching it but I can't feel or hear any signs of life.

movieman

The PC will usually boot from the first bootable drive it finds (primary master, primary slave, secondary master, secondary slave), so if you install it in another PC after that computer's boot drive you could see whether it's working there.

Another option would be to get an USB case for it and plug it in after the PC has booted. I got one off ebay for a laptop drive for about a fiver earlier this year when I was trying to recover data off an old laptop drive, I don't know how the price compares for full-size disks.

chuckles1066

naturals wrote:

Hi guys - I think the hard disk in my PC may have died. It won't boot to Windows but there is no message coming up on the screen or anything. I've tried putting a new graphics card in and a new monitor but without luck.

If I were to put the 'knackered' HD into another PC would that mess it up (given it has an OS on it)? There is a light on the underside of the HD so I know that power is reaching it but I can't feel or hear any signs of life.

Is the PATA/SATA cable firmly seated on the both the drive AND the motherboard?

geordie_joe

What does come up on the screen?

I would have thought, even with a dead HD, the computer would still start and go the the POST. Only stopping when it could not find a bootable drive.

marleyboy

Your pc can still detect a HD even if the drive has failed. older drives were easier to tell, when they were dying, you could hear the disk grinding, but nowadays, the bigger drives can stay silent, you can sometimes "feel" if the disk is booting up, I would test it in another pc, ensuring you go for a format (assuming its knackered), if it fails to format as a slave, you know its dead.

chuckles1066

geordie_joe wrote:

What does come up on the screen?

I would have thought, even with a dead HD, the computer would still start and go the the POST. Only stopping when it could not find a bootable drive.

Yep, this is true.

A message along the lines of "no primary boot device found" should be displayed.

Just a thought...........if there's a non-bootable USB device connected, the system might hang with just a flashing cursor in the top left of the screen?

My Dell had this problem until they released an updated BIOS that overcame it.

everythingblogcast

If everything is pluged in then you may need to get SpinRight 6 from https://www.grc.com costing $80.

geordie_joe

Before you go paying for anything http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ .

It should have the diagnostics you need.

babiebeany

Same thing happened to us back in July. We had lots of info on our hard disk and had never bothered to back it up. We did think that everything was lost, but we did manage to plug it into another PC and downloaded everything onto an external hard drive and then just plugged into our new PC, virus checked it and downloaded the info we needed.

Still haven't learnt our lesson though - not back up since you would have thought we would know better wouldn't you??

It was the guys on this site that helped us and it didn't cost us a penny in the end.

VincentVega

Does anything happen at all? Check for:

1. Do the keyboard lights come on?
2. Does the floppy drive light come on?
3. If there are lights on the motherboard, do they come on?
4. Does it go beep?
5. Does anything appear on the screen?
6. Do the hard drives spin up?
7. Does the graphics card fan (if any) turn on?
8. Does the CPU fan come on?
9. Does the PSU fan come on?

If the PSU fan comes on but nothing else, it's probably a dead CPU.

If you see a message similar to the one that chuckles1066 posted, it could be a hard drive issue. You could try resetting your BIOS - your PC may have a short bout of amnesia (used to happen on mine).