Hard
Drive Failure Diagnostics
Are all installed IDE drives
properly identified by the BIOS and displayed on the start-up screen? Any
modern PC should be able to identify the drive by model number, brand,
capacity, and usually the transfer mode. Some brand name PCs may not display a
start-up BIOS registration screen, so you'll have to enter CMOS Setup to view
the information. If the key stroke required to enter CMOS Setup isn't displayed
on the screen as the PC begins to boot, you'll need to look it up in the
documentation or on the Internet. Common keys used to access CMOS Setup at boot
are, <DEL>,
<F1> and <F2>.
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Any
time two IDE
drives share a single cable, the computer needs a way to tell them apart. This
can be accomplished by using jumpers on the drives to set one to
"Master" and the other to "Slave" or through selection by
the cable. The Master/Slave setting is fixed by a single jumper, usually on the
back end of the drive between the power socket and the IDE connector. The
labeling for the jumpers is usually in shorthand, "M" for Master and
"S" for Slave. Some older drives include a jumper for
"Single" (and spelled out labels) for when the drive is the only
drive installed on the ribbon. Since all modern computers support both a
primary and a secondary IDE interface, it's not necessary with a two drive
system to hang them both on the same cable. The boot hard drive should always
be the Master on the primary IDE interface. If the CD, DVD, or any other IDE
drive is to share the same cable, it should be set to Slave.
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Most
new IDE drives
support Cable Select (CS) which means the pin 28 connection in the cable will
determine which drive is Master and which is Slave. The 80 wire ribbon cables
that should come with all new motherboards and drives support cables select and
have color coded connectors: Motherboard IDE Connector - Blue, Slave IDE
connector (middle connector on cable) - Grey, Master - Black. Cable select is
supported by custom 40 wire ribbon cable and older drives; these are usually
found in brand-name systems. The jumpers on both drives should be set to cable
select if you aren't setting one as Master and the other as Slave.
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If the drives still don't register
properly, make sure the power cable is seated in the drive's power socket,
which can take a bit of force. The ribbon cable connectors must also be seated
all the way into the IDE port on both the drives and the motherboard, or
adapter card if you're are using a RAID adapter. The most common reason for a
cabling failure of this sort is that the connection was partially dislodged
when you were working in the case on something else. Try a new ribbon cable.
While cable failures are rare, it can happen, and it's a favorite trick of
investigative reporters writing articles about computer repair rip-offs to
intentionally introduce a bad IDE cable into a PC just to see how many parts a
shop will sell them.
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Does the hard drive spin up? We covered
this in the power supply diagnostics, but I'll repeat it here for convenience.
When the PC powers up, you should hear the hard drive motor spinning up the
drive and the gentle clunking sound of the read/wrote head seeking. If I can't
tell whether or not the drive is spinning up, even with my fingers on the
drive's top cover, I run the drive in my hand. A spun up drive resists a slow
twisting movement just like a gyroscope. Don't flip it quickly or play with it
or you may damage the drive, not to mention touching the circuitry against a
conductor and causing a short. Just power down, put the drive back in and
continue with the diagnostics. If it's a SCSI drive, you're on the wrong
diagnostics page, but maybe some new IDE hard drive will adopt the SCSI
practice of a jumper to delay spin up. SCSI drives offer this option since you
can install up to 15 on a single controller, and spinning them all up at once
would cause the hardiest power supply to droop. Try swapping the power lead or
running the drive on another power supply. One of the reasons I always use four
screws in drives is so I can push hard on the power connector without the unit
shifting around and possibly damaging the circuit board. I've never broken a
power socket off the circuit board on a hard drive, but I've seen it done, so
don't go too crazy on it. Try the hard drive in another PC before you conclude
that it's dead.
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Are the ribbon cable connectors and
the IDE ports on the drives and the motherboard keyed such that the cable can
only go one way? Check the pin 1 location on all of the connectors and ports.
On IDE drives, pin 1 is traditionally located next to the power cord, but it's
not a 100% rule for all time. Motherboards can be pretty strange about cable ports.
I've even seen one where the pin numbering on the floppy and IDE interfaces
were oriented opposite. The pin 1 location on the motherboard is normally
marked with an arrow, a dot, a white square, anything to show one end of the
interface as different from the other. If the motherboard won't register any
drive you attach, even on new cables, and if those drives are spinning up, it
indicates that either the IDE controller is bad or all the drives you've tried
are bad. You can try running on the secondary IDE controller if you've only
been working with the primary, but the next stop is installing an add-in IDE
adapter or replacing the motherboard.
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The
troubleshooting
procedures for IDE drives that aren't recognized by the BIOS are identical,
whether they are hard drives, CDs, DVDs, tapes or any other IDE device. If the
BIOS registers the installed IDE drives correctly and the drive you're having
problems with is a CD or DVD, proceed to the CD or DVD Failure diagnostics.
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Does
the drive cycle
up and down? Try swapping the power lead for a spare or one used by another
drive. Try isolating the drive on its ribbon cable, even if it means
temporarily doing without another drive for the sake of troubleshooting. If
neither fix helps, try disconnecting the ribbon cable to ensure that the drive
isn't receiving some flaky power down signal from a bad IDE interface or crazy
power management scheme. If it still cycles up and down, the drive is probably
toast. Test the drive in another system before labeling it dead.
If you have an old drive that
spins up but won't seek (you never hear the head move in and out), it's
probably a mechanical failure. The last ditch effort before giving up or
sending it out for data recovery is tapping lightly with a screwdriver on the
cover of the drive, away from the circular section where the disks are
spinning. This might encourage a stuck head to get moving. Just make sure you
have your backup media prepared if you try this, because it may work just the
one time.
Does the drive make little clicking noises
and fail to get going? Restart the machine, with the reset button if you have
one, and hopefully it will boot. If not, try in a warmer room, or put the PC in
direct sunlight to warm up and then try it again. You can also replace a laptop hard drive,
in fact, it's one of the few components that can be easily procured. It's far
from guaranteed, but this is one of the few problems that can result from the
drive being too cold rather than too hot. If you do get it started, run
ScanDisk. It doesn't hurt to reseat all of the cables on the drive and the
ribbon cable to the motherboard, since connections can also loosen up over
time. However, if you can't get it going, it could be a legitimate drive
failure. If you mind losing all of the data onboard, try FDISKing and
reinstalling the operating system again.
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Does the BIOS report the transfer
mode correctly, ie, UDMA/100, ATA/66? UDMA must be enabled in CMOS, or set on
"Auto," for high speed transfers. All new IDE hard drives require the
80 wire ribbon cable, at least for high speed operation. You can check CMOS
Setup to see if there's a manual override to select the higher speed transfers,
though the automatic settings should pick it up. Also try isolating the hard
drive as the sole device on the primary controller. If you're adding a new hard
drive to an older system, it's possible that motherboard / BIOS simply doesn't
support the faster transfer, even with the new cable. I'd be leery of flashing
the BIOS to try to get the speed up, even if the motherboard manufacturer
supplies it.
Check the settings in CMOS and
make sure the drive transfer rate isn't being turned down to some ancient PIO
mode. CMOS may allow you to set both the PIO mode and the UDMA mode for each
individual drive. The default setting should be "Auto" for all of
these. Check all of the operating system related drive settings (caching, etc.,
varies like crazy with OS). Make sure you have enough RAM installed for the
applications you are running. If the system bogs every time you open a new
window or scroll down a page and you hear the hard drive seeking itself silly,
you're probably swapping out to virtual memory on the hard drive too often. RAM
is cheap, 256 MB isn't a bad investment in your sanity.
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Can you install an operating system,
or access the drive with any generation of FDISK to create or view partitions?
Check again that the ribbon cable is fully and evenly seated and there aren't
any "read only" jumpers set on the drive (normally only found on
SCSI's). Try a new ribbon cable. If this doesn't do it, it sounds like either
the drive's MBR is messed up, or there's a problem with the way the software is
communicating with the BIOS, which really shouldn't happen. If you don't mind
losing whatever info is on the drive, you can try FDISK/MBR and see if it helps
Thank you,
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