Odd hard drive boot-up failure

R

Robert P

Member
I have a Seagate Barracuda 250 gig IDE drive that's worked fine as my gaming drive for a couple of years running Windows 7 Home Premium.

I also have an XP SATA drive I use for A/V work and will frequently swap drives into the same machine. Have had no problem doing this. Suddenly the Seagate drive developed an issue where it won't boot. Not like the typical "click of death" failure. It makes this repetitive whirring sound.

Here's the odd part. If I hook it up as a slave drive, it fires up fine, Windows XP sees it, sees the files on it. HD Tune says the drive is good. Since I make periodic backups with Macrium Reflect, I formatted the Seagate drive and restored the latest update image, hooked it up as the master and it works fine - can shut it down and reboot repeatedly. Games work fine.

However, if I again swap over to the XP drive then go back to the Seagate drive the Seagate fails again.

I've done this drill a couple of times - restore with the Macrium backup, works okay for a while then repeats the above problem.

Any idea why this is happening?
 
What exactly happens when you try booting to it? Do you get any error messages after the post screen?
 
Could be swapping from a IDE to a SATA is freaking the bios out. Like boot order, hooking the IDE it could just be stalling. Are you unhooking them each time or just changing the boot order with both hooked up?
 
StrangleHold said:
Could be swapping from a IDE to a SATA is freaking the bios out. Like boot order, hooking the IDE it could just be stalling. Are you unhooking them each time or just changing the boot order with both hooked up?
Click to expand...
Unhooking them altogether. The drive shows up in the bios.
 
Last edited:
johnb35 said:
What exactly happens when you try booting to it? Do you get any error messages after the post screen?
Click to expand...
Once when after getting it running again I got a "cannot communicate with drive" or words to that effect but now it's just not responding.
 
When the ide won't boot up, go into the bios and see if it detects the IDE drive. I just have a feeling that the IDE drive is getting old and its starting to fail on you. You could download and run seatools for dos on it and run the full scan.
 
Are you saying they are both hooked up all the time or your swapping them out? If swapping them, why don't you just keep both hooked up and just change the boot order depending on which drive you want to use? You said when hooked up as a slave, is anything thing else on the IDE cable and are you changing the jumpers on the drive.

What motherboard is this?
 
Last edited:
StrangleHold said:
Are you saying they are both hooked up all the time or your swapping them out? If swapping them, why don't you just keep both hooked up and just change the boot order depending on which drive you want to use? You said when hooked up as a slave, is anything thing else on the IDE cable and are you changing the jumpers on the drive.

What motherboard is this?
Click to expand...
Swapping out until I build my dedicated game machine.

I think it may be an issue with the data cable. Just for grins I hooked it up using the slave connector and it booted up fine. Maybe one of the wires at the master end is broken and may or may not make connection depending on the position of the cable.
 
Hooking and unhooking a drive on a cable could put wear and tear on it. I don't understand why you just leave them both hooked up and just pick which one you want to boot from by the boot order.

As far as the master/slave. You do know that the drive itself has master/slave jumpers? If you have the drive set as master it doesn't matter which connector its hooked too. You can have a cable with the master in the middle and the slave at the end, as long as that's the way you have the jumpers set. If you running 2 drives on the cable and set both drives jumpers to CS (cable select) then the drive at the end will be master and the one in the middle will be the slave. Its all got to do with what the drive jumper is set too.

Plus master and slave has nothing to do with boot order. Swapping the drives around, I think your having a problem with your boot order. The reason its not booting to the IDE drive sometimes.

Try leaving the SATA and IDE both hooked up. Set the IDE drive jumper to master and hook it up to the middle of the cable (since you think the end might be messed up). When the computer first boots at the bios screen on the bottom, it should say something like press a certain key for boot order. Press it and pick what ever drive you want to boot from.
 
StrangleHold said:
Hooking and unhooking a drive on a cable could put wear and tear on it. I don't understand why you just leave them both hooked up and just pick which one you want to boot from by the boot order.
Click to expand...
Besides not wanting to have a drive running out part of its lifespan just spinning doing nothing, when I have the A/V drive hooked up I usually need the drive bay space for other drives.

I plan on putting together a dedicated gaming machine so it should become a moot point. Was just curious about this problem.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top