Hard drive?

[error]

Hey All

I've got a strange problem with a lot of detail so I'll try to be as clear as possible about what I tried so far.

User was burning backups and left the pc unattended. A power failure occurred and although it was on a ups nobody bothered to shut it down so it eventually ran the battery down and died. The following day it failed to boot. The fan would give a half-hearted attempt to spin and then nothing. A few minutes of rest and then the same thing.

What I tried:

-put power supply in test pc and powered up fine

-put known good power supply in pc and pc started to power up but new ps started to smoke so I killed that immediately and replaced original

-disconnected everything except mobo and hd with no change

-disconnected hd and reconnected cd drive and powered up ok

-put known good hd in pc and powered up fine

-put hd in test pc as master and failed to power up (problem isolated right!?!)

-test pc will boot with hd as slave but not as master

-original pc will not boot with original hd as either master or slave

-replaced hd (200gig Maxtor on ide contoller pci card) with 200gig WD on ide 0, imaged old hd onto new hd and booted fine.

The problem now is that during testing the original problem occurred, but after few minutes of rest booted up and then no problems. Returned pc to user and first attempt to power up same thing. Then no problems. Today user says it won't power up at all.

To top that off, the ps that started smoking has been installed in a test pc and is still going strong.

Any suggestions on where to go next would be greatly appreciated!

[efc]

I would attempt to repair the MBR. LINK (http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkd_tro_ldau.asp)

[lankan_man]

Ouhhh! I had the same MBR problem, here is the TZ link:

http://www.techzonez.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3975 might also work

[error]

Sometimes it boots into Windows fine and other times it doesn't even stay on long enough to get through the post. This leads me to beleive the MBR is okay and the problem is more likely hardware. At the most it'll run for 1-2 seconds then...lights out. I went ahead and removed the IDE controller card that the old Maxtor HD was connected to since I connected the new HD to IDE0 on the mobo. I don't know why the Maxtor needed it's own controller card 'cause IDE0 was unused. I thought maybe the card got damaged in the power failure but I didn't have a test pc to try it in. Anyway, that got it booting up again but like I said it was only having this problem intermittently. I guess I'll just have to wait for the next phone call.

[phishhead]

hey error if you need a ide controller got a few extras if you need to test the controller or you can grab one from stripe.

[rik]

Also ensure that you change the ide cable as well. If you are testing with the old one try a new one. As well as a different power lead from the PS.

[error]

I used the new ide cable that came with the new HD and I tried different leads off the PS when I was originally testing but was still expeiencing the problem intermittently. Removing the controller card seems to have fixed it for now but if the problem comes back I'll be posting again.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Any thoughts as to why the Maxtor was using a controller card when IDE 0 was available? Did I mention it was a Fry's box? I advised the user (a doctor) to buy name brand systems from now on. He can afford it.