Disk I/O Error

[GeekDrew]

I am trying to get an old (3 years old) motherboard to work. I have 2 hard drives, an old 2.1GB hard drive that came with the motherboard, and a Seagate 3.2GB hard drive that came with another computer. When I plug in the old hard drive, the bios does not detect it or anything. When I plug in the Seagate hard drive, the bios detects it fine, but after post, where it would normally say starting windows, it says Disk I/O Error - Replace disk and try again (or something along those lines). What does this mean? I am assuming that it means the motherboard is bad. I have a new computer, and the old drive will not be detected on it either. However, when I plugged in the Seagate, it was not detected at first either. It didn't detect anything, and then when it displayed the normal Boot Disk Error, I heard the hard drive spin up. I hit CTRL+ALT+DEL and the computer detected it and all was well with that.

Can anyone tell me what is going on?

 

[GeekDrew]

ttt

 

[GeekDrew]

up we go...

is it that obvious and i'm just being stupid or doesn't anybody care to reply? i just tried to run scandisk on it and it said that it found errors...i think that i'll let it run a full check on it tonight

 

[GeekDrew]

i swear i only clicked that button once...

 

[AngelOfDeath]

Have you tried to partition it with fdisk and make the partition active???. Afterwards do the format c and reinstall windows.

AoD

 

[Racer7201]

I worked on a friends computer the other day with a WD and it had the same error. The drive was practically dead. With a boot disk in, it took about 5 minutes to get to the a prompt. Disconnected the hd and it came right up to the prompt no problem. Put a new hd in and been working great.

 

[GeekDrew]

I ran FDISK and it said that the partition was already active...
and there is a lot of data on that drive that I don't want to lose...

The computer will not start up if the hard drive is set as master, but the data on it is accessable if you use another boot disk and have the bad drive set as slave.

Any more ideas?

Andrew