Hard Drive issues

[SirNuke]

It seems that a hard drive in a computer I am repairing is having issues. On every boot up, the bios takes forever to find the hard drive, but its runs okay once windows starts booting up. One time, however, the bios did not find the hard drive at all. I'm going to try using a different hard drive latter, because I suspect that this should not be happening (the bios takes longer to find the hd then windows takes booting up)

Thanks in advance
SirNuke (first 1014)

 

[edfair]

Why don't you get the manufacturer's diagnostics and run them? At least you'll be starting from a known point, although they don't catch everything.
There are some other issues that will affect the finding. Noise, for instance. Try a different length cable or an eide (80) wire cable for instance.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[Cindy1]

It sounds like it might be on it's way out. I would defrag and run scandisk and check for bad sectors. I know that takes a lot of time but my last resort would be to pull out my ghost and transfer the data onto a new drive before the old one poops the bed.
Keep us updated,
Cindy

 

[sulumnad]

Yeah I had that happen with a hard drive that was on its way out the door. I was forced to copy everything to another drive. It was a shame cause it sort of worked... or it worked when it was detected. Weeks later I took it out and gave it to someone with a warning and it acted fine, but it only lasted another month, but it ended up on a much slower less used system. I've had Maxtor replace my main hard drive twice so far, it was 20Gig one, the one that I mentioned earlier was a 30G either WD or Generic.
-Marc
"ooooh! this not be cheap!

 

[SirNuke]

Yes, I was thinking about the strong possiblity of it dieing soon... However, the hd works perfectly once windows starts booting up. I'd rather not have to reinstall, but it looks that is best option.

SirNuke (first 1014)

 

[pdoug76]

If its set to auto detect. change it so it won't auto detect on every bootup.