Hard Drive Problem/Tear In Ribbon

jek1862

New Member
I just put in a new hard drive. I had 120gb, but wanted more space, so put in a 320. I also was recently getting some strange error messages upon bootup that was causing me to think there might be a problem with the 120, since it was a refurbished, not new, drive. Sometimes, it wouldn't allow me to get to the log in screen, sometimes it would...in a word, very 'inconsistent'.
I don't have the wording of the error message right now....if it comes up again(I hope it doesn't), I will include it in a subsequent posting as it may give more information as to what may be wrong.
I've had the 320 in for about 5 days and haven't gotten the error message I was getting with the 120, making me think it was the old hard drive. I did do a chkdsk /f and a chkdsk /r and both came up no problems, so I wasn't sure.
But, unfortunately, when I booted up today, those same strange messages came up with the 320. I decided to take a look inside my machine to see if I could 'see anything' out of the ordinary. Well, all the wires looked okay, but I DID notice a 'tear' in part of the ribbon(I have a desktop IDE hard drive, about 5 year old Dell computer). This may be the cause of my problem. What do you think? If there is a 'tear' in that 'ribbon' what might happen? I have no idea how it tore. It's not a real bad tear, but noticeable.
So I reconnected my hard drive to the other place inside you can connect a drive. This ribbon looks intact. So far no problem, or error messages. Was this a wise, logical thing to do? What diagnostics should I run? I already ran the chkdsks, I don't know what else to do, other than hope by connecting my hard drive to the other place for an internal drive, that it may bypass the ribbon that is 'torn'. I would tend to think it would.
Any thoughts or advice would be appreciated. Thanks.
 
If the ribbon is torn then you can go to any local repair shop and ask for a replacement IDE cable and should only cost a couple bucks at most. They do get brittle as they age and they should not get kinked, creased, or twisted while inside the case.
 
In cases like this, it's not only the IDE cable that's suspect, but also includes the hard drive, IDE interface on the motherboard, and the southbridge.

Best is to run a non-destructive "write-read-verify" test to test the entire loop for errors.

You can use HDAT2 for this purpose, available here: http://www.hdat2.com/
 
Razormind: There are many different downloads on the download page for the HDTA2. Can you tell me which one I should download for my IDE hard drive? Will this software give me a printout of the results I can copy and paste here for your review, as I may not understand the results. Thanks.
 
Thank you for that. When I tried to run it, it said to 'boot up in PURE DOS MODE'. What is "pure dos mode"? Is that the same thing as 'safe mode'? Please let me know. Thanks.
 
After you burn the ISO to CD, restart your PC and change boot order in BIOS to CDROM 1st.

Then you are booted automatically in PURE DOS Mode, and the program runs.
 
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