HD problem

[DesertPCer]

Hi all, first time poster here.

My PC boots fine, but the light that indicates that the HD is spinning stays lit. The HD is a Maxtor 20 gig (about 2 years old) but under My Computer, Properties, it only says it is a 19.0 gig. Finally, it is not recognizing my optical drives (a Hitachi DVD Rom and an HP 9500 CD-RW). I have not had any of these problems in the past, but yesterday they all showed up at once. I suspect that the HD is not allowing the boot sequence to finish and get the optical drives recognized.

Thoughts and potential solutions? If the solution is a new HD, can you point to a good primer on how to change a HD out in a single HD system (I am a novice)?

The rest of my system specs follow, if they will help:

PIII 800mhz
512 MB SDRAM
Intel MB

Thank you!

[glc]

The 19 gig capacity indication is normal due to the math used to calculate capacities.

What version of Windows is this? Open Device Manager, are any of the IDE controllers "flagged"? If Windows can't load the IDE controller driver, this is exactly what will happen. The hard drive will operate at reduced performance, but the optical drives will not be seen. There are various reasons why a controller driver won't load, a virus being one of them, and a bad IDE ribbon cable being another - and if one of the optical drives goes bad, it *can* take them both out if they are on the same cable.

[DesertPCer]

Thanks glc.

I am running Windows 98.

I did a virus scan, no viruses found. I checked under Device Manager, neither of the IDE controllers (primary or secondary) under "Hard disk controllers" are flagged.

What's next, unplug the optical drives and see if the HD problem goes away?

Thanks.

[glc]

Unplug the opticals one at a time, then both if necessary. Unplug both the ribbon cable and the power cable. See what happens, one of the opticals may have gone south. You can download and run Powermax on the hard drive to make sure it's healthy, it's free at Maxtor's site.

[Floppyman]

Hi,

I would now unplug one drive at a time and see if the other that is connected is recognized. If you have another cable IDE you might also try swapping IDE cables and see if that makes the optical drives reappear. Let us know what you can come up with and hope this helps.

[mike breck]

It may also be useful to check whether the drives are being recognised by the BIOS when the PC is starting (the black screen with all the hardware info). You can hit the pause key at any point to stop the PC booting and that will give you time to check out the devices that have been detected.

Hitting the Enter key will resume bootup.

If you can't see the Hardware summary page because of some kind of splash screen at bootup, then hit the appropriate key during POST to enter CMOS setup and check if all the devices are detected properly from there.

When disconnecting and swopping devices/cables, you might also try switching power leads as well - in case one of the power leads is faulty.

When was the last time you ran Scandisk and defragged the HD? I was working on a friends old Seagate HD which showed the same symptoms i.e. LED staying on. I ran the manufacturer's software on it and it showed no errors. A defrag improved the situation. However, what solved it was putting a clean install of Windows on the HD.

I'm not saying this is the answer to your problem - but it's always something to keep in mind - especially with a very mature install of Windows.

HTH

[DesertPCer]

Figured out what the problem was - my secondary IDE cable somehow worked loose. Not sure how it worked loose or why that caused the HD to keep spinning (the HD is on the primary cable). But, I seated the seconday cable firmly and the problem disappeared! Boy do I feel silly!

Thanks for all of the help, I definitely picked up some useful information from the replies that everybody posted.

[kissfan]

No need to feel silly.

This is a good pointer to all those suffering from this type of problem. Make sure that all connections are correctly seated and that all drives are set up as either CSL or Master / Slave.