80 conductor cable??

[Raeadhani]

Now, a PC tech I am not, I assure you. And I admit that completely, totally and up front.

The computer which my husband had when I met him is a little p.o.s. which he received from an ex co-worker for 100$. and its very finicky. But, its been doing perfectly (at least mostly) fine for months.
We bought a new western digital drive for it which we use for the master and a *ahem* IBM drive which we got for free for a slave, with an msi motherboard.

Anyway.. went I went to bed last night, the computer was acting just fine. No problems whatsoever. When I got up this morning (the computer stays on during the night) it had apparently restarted somehow. However, it had tried to boot from both floppy and cdrom drives.. not the hard drives for some reason.

boot failure, insert boot disk and hit any key, etc etc etc. :brokenheart:

It continued to do this constantly. I unhooked the slave drive from the ribbon cable and put an xp cd in my cd rom. Now, it gives the message
Primary IDE Channel no 80 conductor cable installed
Primary Master : 17.07W17 WDC etc, etc..



It will begin to load windows xp with its opening screen but then will flash a blue screen for half a second then will restart itself without the most miniscule chance of seeing whats on that blue screen.

Any help would be greatly greatly appreciated as I very much need a computer for business.

Thank you

 

[johnjkr1]

Welcome to the forum Raeadhani,

Firost off, you might want to provide a bit more detail as to system specs. Also, any details of recent changes (new software, hardware, etc.) As for the 80-pin message, all that is telling you is that you are using an older 40 wire cable and not an 80 wire cable. It doesn't hurt anything, it will just make the hard drive run a bit slower.

Here is a picture comparing the two:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80.html

Basically, 40 wire is for cdroms and such, 80 wire is for hard drives. Although you can use 80 wire with cdroms just fine. From your explanation I think you just mixed the cables up.

Has anyone played with the cables?

As for your windows issue, windows xp is set by default to "automatically reboot on errors", so if you get a blue screen, it reboots. You should try going to safe mode and seeing if that works properly. Reboot the pc, start tapping the F8 key, and choose safe mode. If your pc goes into safe mode o.k. reboot and try normal mode.

It is also possible you have a dead or dying hard drive, a virus, perhaps a worm (were your updates current?). Is the IBM drive detected at all?