HDD has died ? - Help !

[SiLiZiUMM]

My friend got a weird problem. he has a Soyo motherboard and Fujitsu HDD. Both worked fine since march. Yesterday, he couldn't boot up, the HDD's name in the bios POST was shown as "triangles" and other weird stuff and the Bios wouln't boot further. Anyone know a solution to this ? Is the HDD broken?

The hdd, like the comp, is new since march 2001. i tried to disconnect the HDD, it booted fine until it can't find anything to boot on (normal..). i tried to swap the hdd from IDE bus, same problem. I disabled the "halt on" on the bios, and booted on a partition magic floppy. PM says it detects a drive, but there is no partition and no space (0MB)...

Any clues ?

 

[SiLiZiUMM]

Anyone?

 

[Danzilla]

Sounds like it could be hard drive failure or motherboard failure. He hasn't just added or changed anything else, has he?
Anyway, he does have a floppy drive right? Well try booting from that. If you have a spare HD laying around somewhere you can try booting from that to make sure it's not a problem with the MB/Bios. If the Hard Disk is the problem, it could be either a phyiscal failure where the drive would have to be replace or just corrupt date which would mean you would probably have to repartition and format. The fact that the volume name was changed to "triangles" makes me think of some kind of 'boot virus'. Was the system protected? That's all I can think of at the moment.
Good luck,
D.

 

[jmagg]

Sometimes a bad cable, a dusty or bad connection to the motherboard will cause corrupt characters on bios detection and failure. Ive spent many hours troubleshooting a device only to find out it was a cable problem. Good place to start.

 

[Danzilla]

Hey. When you say the volume label was changed to "Triangles", you do mean the word, right? Not a bunch of triangle symbols or something?

 

[SiLiZiUMM]

Example, when the comps do the POST, it says something like (in normal time) :
Primary master : HDD brand, model number
Primary slave : CD-Rom brand, model
Secondary slave : CD-R brand, model
Secondary master : none

When I boot his system, I get that:
Primary master : ...
Primary slave : CD-Rom brand, model
Secondary slave : CD-R brand, model
Secondary master : none

And yes, the HDD's line is (sometimes) exactly "...", sometimes it's kinds of ascii characters that looks like triangles like that "|/" (I hope you understand my ascii art The triangle is actually white on the black background). Bunch of weird symbols though.

As I said, i disconnected the power of the HDD and booted from a floppy, worked fine. I reconnected the cables but changed the drive from primarty to secondary, the problem was still there.

The guy didn't played in his computer since he added a ram stick, back in november 2001.

When I selected in the bios the option "halt on" and selected "none" to avoid the computer refuse to not-boot because of the HDD problem, I was able to boot on the Partition Magic floppy. Partition Magic showed me a drive but no partition on it and no data and no space avaiable on the drive.

When I check the Bios properities and check the IDE drives properities, even if I set the HDD to "Auto", it says "0 MB" and no HDD name at all.

I think the system was protected (in the bios and in Windows, the guy uses Norton). But he says the problem occured right after he was downloading on Morpheus I think. Could this be a virus that did all that sh*t ? And if it's a virus, is it safe to test the "broken" HDD on my own computer ?

 

[SiLiZiUMM]

Forgot to say he heard a strange sound (don't know what) that came from the computer case when the computer froze when he was on Morpheus. Then he rebooted. When Windows loaded again, scandisk.exe wasn't found so he couldn't do a scandisk at boot. His computer was up for 10minutes then crashed again. He rebooted, it was up for 2 minutes then crashed for good. Rebooted, and then nothing, at POST, the HDD was "failed" and he couldn't boot further than the POST screen.

Hope this helps.

 

[KGB]

Can you spell RMA?

 

[SiLiZiUMM]

<< Can you spell RMA? >>


RMA? Mabye I don't know because english is not my primary language, but what is RMA please ?

 

[SiLiZiUMM]

*bump*