A question for the computer techs

[Foss]

I think all my IDE hard drives have all become mysteriously faulty at the same time. They were all working fine last Monday, and my old motherboard died last Wednesday or Thursday. I bought a new mobo, RAM, and CPU yesterday, but when I put it together and whacked in my old primary hard disk and installed my new Windows, I get an error trying to boot.

I've posted it up on the TechSupportGuy forums, so to save retyping it all here, I'll just leave you that link.

Any ideas?

[Ascendant Rice]

the hdd could of been damaged by a power surge when ure mb died.

[CHA54]

Did you remove all partitions from the old drive before re-installing?

If Windows completed the install and you get the error after the final reboot I'd say it's partition related. I'd also be checking the IDE mode in the bios.

Edited March 16, 2010 by CHA54

[Foss]

the hdd could of been damaged by a power surge when ure mb died.

Didn't have a power surge. Motherboard died of old age and the fact that they were a pretty woeful board in the first place. Aside from that, only 1 of the 3 drives was actually in the comp at the time, so a surge wouldn't kill all 3.

Did you remove all partitions from the old drive before re-installing?

If Windows completed the install and you get the error after the final reboot I'd say it's partition related. I'd also be checking the IDE mode in the bios.

Yep. Dumped all partitions and repartitioned from scratch. I thought the same thing. IDE mode? Its a PATA drive, not a SATA one.

[CHA54]

ok, there's a few articles on technet about Windows 7 disk read error on boot and the steps to resolve it.

[Foss]

Just did a bit of a search of Technet. Couldn't see anything specific to Windows 7. Don't spose you have any links?

[Keisari]

I've encountered one or two problems of this sort over the years. Not all of these seem to be relevant to your case, but a few things to check:

1) I once found that one of my IDE drives would refuse to boot because the 'wrong' connector on the cable was used. You know how IDE cables have one connector going to the mainboard then a long bit of cable and two connectors for master/slave IDE? For some reason, this drive (which was set to master) refused to boot when connected using the connector at the very end of the cable - it only worked using the 'middle' one... if that makes sense? Days of agony were spent on this one....

2) Make sure you haven't overloaded one of the PSU rails. I once tried to connect 3 or 4 drives on the one rail using splitters and, well, it didn't work so well. Another miserable few days...

3) Go into the BIOS and into the screen that shows you the HDD or RAID settings. Make sure the drive is not set to AHCI mode (it shouldn't be, I think it's only applicable to SATA drives. But I once got the same error you describe after changing the drive to AHCI).

4) Disconnect every drive (CD drives as well) except the one you want to boot.

Good luck mate, that's all I can think of at the moment.

[Foss]

1) I once found that one of my IDE drives would refuse to boot because the 'wrong' connector on the cable was used. You know how IDE cables have one connector going to the mainboard then a long bit of cable and two connectors for master/slave IDE? For some reason, this drive (which was set to master) refused to boot when connected using the connector at the very end of the cable - it only worked using the 'middle' one... if that makes sense? Days of agony were spent on this one....

Very strange. Dodgy cable? I had something similar a while back. I had the drive on the very end on Cable Select and the drive to the middle as Master, so of course I had 2 masters so neither was recognised.

2) Make sure you haven't overloaded one of the PSU rails. I once tried to connect 3 or 4 drives on the one rail using splitters and, well, it didn't work so well. Another miserable few days...

I've only got the DVD-RW and the HDD on that line. Shouldn't hurt, given I previously had those same 2 drives plus a floppy drive (remember those? ) on that same one before the upgrade.

3) Go into the BIOS and into the screen that shows you the HDD or RAID settings. Make sure the drive is not set to AHCI mode (it shouldn't be, I think it's only applicable to SATA drives. But I once got the same error you describe after changing the drive to AHCI).

The BIOS defaults to IDE. Its one of the things I noticed while looking for settings to fix the problem.

4) Disconnect every drive (CD drives as well) except the one you want to boot.

Tried that. No dice.

I think I'll just go buy a new HDD tonight. Turns out my local shop can do me a Samsung 250gb SATA for $58! Thats ridiculously cheap! I can't even buy them from my wholesalers for that.

[DJKOR]

When I used to use IDE drives, one problem I used to encounter more than others was a dodgy IDE cable. Just because the way they work really. The cable basically clamps onto the rear of the plug and a clip holds it tight. The connections there can sometimes go a little funny, so that's one thing to consider.

But as you said though, hard drives are cheap as chips these days, and the added speed of SATA is also a benefit.

[Foss]

Definately wasn't the IDE cable. Tried 3 or 4. The only reason I didn't want to go to SATA is coz I felt no need blowing money on a new drive when my IDE has more than enough space for Windows and progs. All my data is stored on a 1Tb external, which I've barely scratched the surface of. Ended up biting the bullet and putting down the $58 for a new drive. Low-level-format of the IDE drives didn't work, and I just couldn't be ar$ed playing anymore. I wanted to get some use out of my shiny new quad-core!

Slightly disappointed though. Win7 only boots about 3 seconds quicker than it did on my old Sempron 2600+

[yoshi]

It can only load as fast as the data can get pulled off of the HDD.

Even though you now have a SATA drive which the cable supports faster bandwidth, the boot time may be limited by the data coming off the platters

[Foss]

Valid point. I'd still have expected a reasonable improvement. I know people with similar drives, half the system specs, and faster Vista boot times!

Oh well. S3 sleep it is! :D

[Keisari]

You've probably already done it, but make sure write-back caching is enabled in the device manager for the drive. This definitely makes a difference.

There's a program called Crystal Disk Info (or something to that effect) that gives you even more options, like acoustic and power management options. You might be able to squeeze a bit more from the drive fiddling with these values. It's also nice to 'see' what the drive's parameters actually are, especially if one is disappointed with the performance.

edit: oh, and make sure you have the latest driver for the controller.

Edited March 17, 2010 by Keisari