one bad mudder

I have 2 ide HDD that I have used for over a year. I had them out of the machine for 2-3 months while I worked on other parts of the PC and my Jeep. When I put them back in The pc says it is trying to find them then says they arent there and moves on. In another PC of mine it just goes past them. And they arent in the my computer list.

I have tried 3 different cables with them. I have tried them one at a time. and as master and slave. I even tried them as slave on the primary ide cable in place of the DVD RW. They worked perfect until I took them out.

Sorry but I posted this as part of a XP software thread, before I noticed the HDD group. The other issues I posted over there are resolved.

When I get them working Im going to add them to my main machine with a raid card i have. I had them hooked up that way once before but they werent stable. They would show up now and then, but never both everytime. Gotta figure that one out next. It would be easy to just go buy a 500 gb SATA HDD but what challange is that?

Im only doing this because I have them, and I need space, and cant justify buying a new HDD if I have 2 sitting here that "worked".

Hit me up with what if any questions you guys have.

All my "spare" money is going into my 1991 Jeep Wrangler project. I have another 2 grand In parts and tools to spend before the jeep is "done" they are really never done. But I plan to mod a case to look as much like the Jeep as I can when the Jeep is done and this PC is working the way it should.

Thank you guys for all the help in the past present and future.
Eric/V1PER/

smz

If you don't feel like troubleshooting things to see if you have an issue with your motherboard's ide controller I always have a promise pci hard drive controller with it's own bios laying around here for situations just like you are describing.

I normally respond with thorough answers but it appears that the 500GB Sata is where you are headed so I will offer this as a cheap solution that very well may put you back in business instead of going down the check list. It's easy to say reset the bios to factory,etc. But this is a very cheap way to isolate things. In your bios you would simply tell it to boot from an "add in card" or if that is not listed, SCSI is another option.

Here's a link for an el cheapo that would do the trick. Hey I'd let you borrow one of mine but I presume we aren't exactly neighbors, lol.

This is the poor man's version of the promise card based on the via chipset. If the internal bios on the card sees your drive you will certainly need to load a driver via XP in order to boot from it but I wouldn't worry about that till you see if the card bios detects it and not the system bios.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...VT6410&cat=CCD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816124006

I'm guessing one of the guys from the HD team may come out here with some troubleshooting tips as well.

one bad mudder

I have the raid card and cd. That is the next step. Getting a PC to find the HDDs is the issue. After many tries in different slots and different cables I was able to find one of the two in another PC. So I hit it with partion magic and now it works as it should on all the pcs. I have no idea why. The other HDD makes a scary sound when it spins up, I had to put my ear close to it and have it out of the machine away from noise but it sounds like the head is hitting the disk. It never makes it up to speed, it just keeps cycling this sound. I am glad the disk was empty. I plan to open it to make sure a head crash is what happened. then i can smash the disk platter before i throw it away.

smz

Sounds like a 100% hardware issue on one and the other was probably not being detected with the right parameters. Inside the other machine it was detected with different heads, cylinders, sectors, etc. sometimes not off by much. Some will see it as LBA some won't. But if you format a drive in one config then try to move it to another machine that sees it completely different, normally you will see the drive identify itself, but it's useless as far as using it with the existing format and would demand like you said a partition magic or sometimes a lowlevel format.

one bad mudder

I "dissembled" the bad drive and..... If any of you that have wondered, but never dared to open a HDD I have step by step pictures into the heart of a HDD.

I did find a head crash, and have a few cool pictures of it.

Let me know if you all want to see them, other wise this topic is closed. I could post them as a standalone topic, if the tech guys think that would e better.

smz

Well 50% was good and 50% is garbage bound. I guess better than Nada. My theory on why the working drive was seen on the pci card on the other machine may link to my theory of the other computers stock ide controller detecting it differently then the onboard bios on the pci card. One never knows. Who knows how many years it will take for SSD drives to really make an impact and a pricepoint that can compete, but that should end all this config nonsense having hard drives with no moving parts. That is going to be very cool! talk about quiet and for you notebook lovers, a little less power consumption too.