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Dead Hard Drive?

M

Mr Smiley

Senior member
My neighbor brought a computer over that is fairly old. It's running win me. He told me that the other day he tried to turn it on but the operating system would not come up. So I booted it up and it says "invalid boot diskette in a:." I stuck in a ME boot disk and went into dos and tried fdisk but it didn't recognize any partitions. I then opened up the case and looked at all the connections. They all seemed fine so I decided to boot up DSL(damn small linux) I tried mounting the drive but it couldn't find anything. What's weird is if I go into the bios and under IDE Config it shows under Primary IDE Mastery "WDC200EB-11BHF0" which happens to be the had drive. What do you think? Cooked hard drive? Is there anything else I can do to check?
 
Especially on an older machine that nobody has opened, one of the more common troubles that spontaneously develops is simply a loose or dirty connection in cable connectors. When these symptoms pop up for me, one of my first steps is simply to disconnect everything ESPECIALLY the power supply, open it up and carefully unplug and re-connect every cable related to the drives. That means both ends of each cable (HDD and mobo, data cables and power lines), and for assurace I will unplug / reconnect several times. This seems to scrape off a bit of junk on the pins and re-establish a clean connection. You might even do this with the little jumpers stuck into the socket on the back of the HDD that are used to establish Master and Slave settings. Be SURE to put these back in exactly the same place!

Do this carefully - you don't want to bend or break anything, or misalign and re-connect wrongly. And check to be sure all this activity didn't disturb another connector. Then close it up, reconnect the externals and power cord, and try it out. Most of the time in my experience it solves the problem.
 
Just to cover all the bases...
* Slap a new IDE cable on the thing,
* Pull the HD and try it in an external enclosure.
 
since its win ME, it IS old, therefore the mobo is also old
therefore the absolute first thing one must check for when a HDD is seen in bios but not in mobo is to
CHECK FOR BULGED ON TOP OR LEAKING FILTER CAPACITORS ON THE MOBO
 
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