• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

HDD problem -Sometimes shows in BIOS, sometimes it doesn't

RalfHutter

RalfHutter

Diamond Member
Box is a friends' Dell Deminsion T500. 500mhz PIII, IBM 13GB HDD, 128MB RAM.

Started giving him errors on boot, he knows nothing about computers and called me over. What's happening is when you start the computer the HDD gets power (I can feel it spin up) but sometimes it doesn't get detected during POST so it won't boot past the POST screen. This happens maybe once out of every four times you try and start it up, the rest of the time it is seen by the BIOS and boots into Windows just fine.

-I took it out and checked/reseated the IDE and power connections at the drive and at the board and it comes up AWOL from time to time.

-Put on a new IDE cable and moved it to a different power connector. Still comes up missing occaisionally.

-Drive was set at Cable select, I changed it to Master. Still no luck.

-Ran IBM's Drive Fitness Test on the drive and it says the drive is fine.

So now what? Is the IDE controller dying? Any other suggestions?
 
Unfortunately the PSU is one of those stupid Dell Proprietary ones, can't just swap in a different non-Dell PSU.

Anyone else have any suggestions?
 
Somebody must have run up against something like this before. HDD appears and disappears intermittently...

Please help.
 
you ain't gonna like my response. had a similiar problem with the system randomly recognizing the hd's, often forcing me into CMOS and manually loading the data. Turned out to be a faulty mb; replaced it and problems disappeared. that was after flashing my bios and swapping psu's. hope your solution is less painful. an option you might try is connecting it to a friend's system as a slave and seeing if the system consistantly "sees" it. that would eliminate at one variable. good luck
 
Before swapping the mobo, etc., try changing IDE cables. Sometimes it is simply a bad connector that has a hidden loose wire.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top