Baffled: Need help

S

slamtry

New Member
I recently wanted to try to get some old data from a friends old IDE hard drive so that we could save his data on CD's. I plugged one of them onto my desktop running XP Pro, attached the IDE cable to it on the cables middle plug and plugged ina power cable.

Now at this point I must admit, I didn't set or check any jumpers on the hard drive. I just thought it might show up in Windows Explorer as drive D: or whatever. What happened was the computer would POST but then would not boot into windows. All I got was a flashing cursor on a black screen. I removed old the hard drive (i.e. my friend's) and rebooted, hoping that at least my machine would be fine. Nope. It still wouldn't boot into windows.

Here's what I have done: removed all the peripherals and tried it: no go. Same problem. So, I tested the power supply with a voltmeter. All seems to be reading correctly, i.e. just about 5V or 12V where it ought to be. I ran a hard drive checking utility from Samsung on my own hard drive (it checked out fine) and did a low level format. Then I reloaded Windows. No problem, except when I set the BIOS back to boot off the HD before the CD-drive, it still refuses to boot.

What now? Is it the motherboard and how do I test that?

Dan
 
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with more then 1 IDE drives you need to make sure the jumpers are set properly and the one with the operating system is the one that gets booted from first in the bios. Plus it might matter were you have the drives located on that IDE cable if you have more then one device on that cable
 
konsole said:
with more then 1 IDE drives you need to make sure the jumpers are set properly and the one with the operating system is the one that gets booted from first in the bios. Plus it might matter were you have the drives located on that IDE cable if you have more then one device on that cable
Click to expand...

Right but now I have gone back to my original configuration so what is the problem now? Can plugging an extra IDE HD kill the MB?
 
Maybe you plugged the IDE cable wrong. Usually the IDE might have to out connections... did you try the other one?
ide-ribbon-cable.jpg


Like in the picture... try connecting your hard drive to the other connector.
 
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