ckronengold
Junior Member
the other day, out of the blue, my computer (dell 8200, P4 1.7, 640 mb RDRAM) just wouldn't boot. restarting just gave me the F1 to reboot, F2 for SetUp and I heard a "tick tock" type clicking. slow, rhythmical, repetitive.
after hours on the phone with Dell, running full diagnostics that took hours, ending up with them telling me I needed a new hard drive. BIOS just wouldn't recognize the hard drive or any of the hardware in the system.
the machine is back up and running, but i'm not really sure why.
i pulled my maxtor slave drive (diamondmax 540, 120gb) out of the box, which has all my digital files on it. did that as a precaution and just to take it out of the mix.
finally got the machine to boot with a Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools CD. Got into DOS, ran scandsk and chkdsk and it seemed to work. master hard drive is a WD 2000JB.
but when I tried to put the 2nd drive back in, the computer wont boot. when i take it out, i'm still screwed with not being able to boot, and having to use a norton ghost bootable and the western digital disc to get it to boot again.
the maxtor drive doesn't have an OS on it, as I was using it just for storage. can't believe that this is causing the problem. i only took it out of the machine so I wouldn't lose all my files. now it seems like it was the problem.
where do I go from here? and why would a failure of a slave drive cause the whole system to fail? is there hope of recovering the data?
any advice is much appreciated.
after hours on the phone with Dell, running full diagnostics that took hours, ending up with them telling me I needed a new hard drive. BIOS just wouldn't recognize the hard drive or any of the hardware in the system.
the machine is back up and running, but i'm not really sure why.
i pulled my maxtor slave drive (diamondmax 540, 120gb) out of the box, which has all my digital files on it. did that as a precaution and just to take it out of the mix.
finally got the machine to boot with a Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools CD. Got into DOS, ran scandsk and chkdsk and it seemed to work. master hard drive is a WD 2000JB.
but when I tried to put the 2nd drive back in, the computer wont boot. when i take it out, i'm still screwed with not being able to boot, and having to use a norton ghost bootable and the western digital disc to get it to boot again.
the maxtor drive doesn't have an OS on it, as I was using it just for storage. can't believe that this is causing the problem. i only took it out of the machine so I wouldn't lose all my files. now it seems like it was the problem.
where do I go from here? and why would a failure of a slave drive cause the whole system to fail? is there hope of recovering the data?
any advice is much appreciated.
