HDD or IDE problem?

[Adora]

I'm swapping around some old and not-so-old parts to build an extra computer. Specs are as follows:

Tyan S2380 mb
Athlon 800 cpu
128mb generic PC-133
Accelgraphics 8mb AGP vid card (that I tried to upgrade to a 16mb TNT2...unsucessfully)
Yamaha sound card
e-tech 56k modem
Deer 250w PS
Western Digital 30gb 5400 RPM ata66 HD
generic 36x cd-rom
...all under Win2k

As you can tell, this is pretty much a crap system...nothing like my 1.2 ghz Athlon sweetheart. Ahh, but I digress.

Problem in short: I cannot boot the HD from the primary IDE controller. I'm getting the "primary master boot disk failed" error. It boots fine (albeit slow at detecting IDE devices during POST) from the secondary controller. I searched around and (finally) found a good drive, which booted fine from the primary. I plugged my 30gigger back up, and it wouldn't boot. I went into CMOS and tried to auto-detect, but it failed.

So now I've switched back to the secondary channel. I downloaded a SMART utility and ran scandisk...no errors yet. What can the problem be?? I would think that if the drive were failing, it would do it on both controllers.

 

[edfair]

Probably neither, but a combination of factors caused by speed. You've found that the controller is OK with another drive, and the drive is OK on another controller. I've had some success with low level on some , but they were ones that would ID correctly.
How about on cold boots? Any difference? How about changing boot order? Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Adora]

I used this HDD with this motherboard for a year with no problems. I took it out and slaved it to my new drive to transfer data. Now I've put it in a different case with the original MB, and it doesn't work. And yes, I put the jumper back to master.

I haven't changed the boot order, but I'll try it. The BIOS isn't even getting to a stage where it attempts to boot. Cold boot, restart...all the same. I saw a piece of advice on another forum to disable auto-detect for devices that aren't there (everything but where I have the HDD connected, in this case).

Right now I'm clueless except for trying to switch out more components again tomorrow. The RAM, sound card, and video card all differ from my original configuration from before. I just want other knowledgeable people to give ME feedback and different things to consider so that I can narrow down the problem, which I am extremely grateful for!

EXTRA NOTE: The cpu fans are also making a buzzing-like noise that they never made before. I thought about adding a drop of oil, but they don't make the noise when I spin the blades around using compressed air. Just a quirk I noticed. ??

 

[edfair]

Sounds like a power supply problem. And if you have a power supply problem youare going to have hard drive problems.
I'd like to think that I knowledgeable, but when you get this type of problem everything is SWAG.
You may want to take everything back to bare minimum and see if they ID. If not, then you have some compatibility problem. You might also slow the processor down to see if it affects the problem. I suspect that you can change the speed. Since it is a fairly modern MB , how about setting the params via user defined? Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[compnut24]

well... just save yourself alot of frustration and buy an IDE/FDD I/O card, it replaces the IDE and floppy controllers on your motherboard, and pretty much for me is a fix-all for IDE problems. BTW, that system sounds pretty good actually. I just built myself a 1.2ghz tbird as well, that 800 actually sounds pretty good, considering what i upgraded from: a 300mhz.