Apparent hard drive failure

[nanochickin]

As you can guess from the title my Dell Dimention 2400 went t!ts up tonight

Basically i was getting ready to install a replacement secondry drive to extend my storage capacity. While copying the important stuff from the secondry drive to the main drive my PC blue screened with a load of numbers etc on the screen with the last bit saying "Stack Dump"

Its p***ed me off as i didn't even manage to get anywhere near the machine with the new drive.

Anyway to cut a long story short when i rebooted the machine it will no longer recognise the fact there is 2 drives on the primary controller. If i remove the secondry drive it will recognise the fact there is a primary drive in the Bios but refuses to boot from it afterwards complining its not there again :|

I was moving about 20gb across the primary controller which as far as i know shouldn't cause any problems.

can anybody give me an idea what might of happened and how it might be fixed

I'm fearing its the HDD controller which wil probably mean a new board, which will have to be a Dell one otherwise all my software will stop working as i don't have the keys for it (Doesn't require it from a Dell PC restore disk)

If i can't fix it i'm going to be doomed to use my daughters Compaq Deskpro PII 400 for the next 12 months :mega:



nano

[Jimdefruit]

Sounds like one of the files you were transferring has corrupted the boot files.

If you have a copy of the original windoze disk you can use that to recover. If that doesn't work get a copy of Hirens CD and restore the MBR (master boot record) and it should all work.

[Unknown user #1]

I never heard of such thing that BIOS could be corrupted by file transfer.

My suggestion is to reset BIOS (by using jumper on board). Then explicitly tell to HDDs which one is what (Master/Slave) via jumpers.

Does it passes BIOS screen and goes to Windows boot stage at all?

[Jimdefruit]

It is not the bios that is corrupted, it is the boot instructions on the first hard drive, or the windows boot files.

If you are able to burn a CD on your laptop, download Hirens 8.8 or 8.7 and use that to diagnose the HD faults and if necessary write a new boot sector. The Disk is about 78 MB so a bit too big to transfer over msn.

[BGonaSTICK]

Jim's diagnosis of a damaged MBR sounds favourite to me.

It might have originally been 'infected' with an MBR-resident stealth virus. The bootstrap record holds an offset pointer to the beginning of the physical partition table which (I think) then addresses the OS startup routine. If this first address is altered or the boot process otherwise tampered with by some malicious code, it can lead to an unbootable drive.

This is more likely if you subsequently force the disk to re-organise by transferring large amounts of data, move a partition or overwrite the MBR with a default copy containing a default address.

Try the specialist tools that Jim's suggested, or you may find that you can address the disk/partition if you install it as an unbootable secondary disk.

That of course requires another bootable primary disk to temporarily replace your original.

BTW, I have a boxfull of bits out of a Compaq Deskpro PII 400 here. I ripped them out and replaced them with an MSI board and an XP2500 Athlon when the IDE controller failed on the motherboard. :

If you ever need any replacement parts for your daughter's, ask me first and I'll see what I've got left.

[Unknown user #1]

Oh, sorry... misread it. Yes, MBR damage is possible.

[nanochickin]

Had a play today with the drives and both of them work fine in my Compaq server and also work fine in the Dell when on the secondry controller. I've concluded that its basically the case that the primary HDD controller has failed on the mainboard.

As a quick fix i have purchased a brand new UDMA 133 PCi HDD controller of ebay for £3.20 which should do the trick until i get a new mainboard.



nano

[nanochickin]

cancel that, the secondry HDD controller went downabout 20 minutes ago and about 2 minutes ago the board shutdown on its own and refused fire up again

It has now left me with no other option but to order a new mainboard

Due to money restraints i have gone for a Asrock P4i65G mainboard which looks near enough the same sort of layout as the Dell mainboard and uses Intels 865GV Chipset so it should in theory be fairly reliable unlike some of the VIA chipset boards i have had in the past

From what i can gather the 865GV chipset was the upgrade for the 845GV chipset which the original Dell board used. :?

Everything else one the board should be a straight swap hopefully

It just leaves me now having to get a COA for my copy of XP Pro which wasn't needed before as it was installed from a genuine Dell OEM installation disk. No Key was ever asked for during installation

Thanks to everyone for replying



nano

[wobblywill]

a few thoughts

correct me if i am wrong but i thought the hdd controler is hard wired

reset bios as previously suggested

change bios battery, low battery charge often causes boot problems

check master/ slave jumpers on relevant hd's

check hd status on another pc (as slave) if you can

strip non essential hardware out, ie any added ram, cards etc. the problem may be elsewhere

forgive me if i am telling granny how to suck eggs but it does not sound like an o/s problem to me :?

Wibble

[nanochickin]

Done all that mate, the HDD controller has fried itself.

The HDD controller is hardwired, although you can buy another UDMA 133 controller which operates in much the same way as a SCSI controller would inserted into a spare PCi slot.

The Dell mainboard is Toast mate it doesn't even fire up now. Something caused the Primary HDD controller to fail which has i suppose caused a cascade failure throughout the board ( I know it sounds very StarTrekkie ops: )

The PC had been running fine in its current pre fried configuration without any problems for the last 6 months, It is just strange that this was all caused by a huge data transfer which it should have handled without an problems :?

Still the new board is paid for and i'm just waiting for it to be delivered. I may even treat myself to a 3.00 Ghz HT Pentium 4 CPU later on.

I know one thing though, its the last time i buy a Dell PC. Its not even 2 years old yet. It should have at least a 5 year span like all my previous Compaq machines have managed. Not impressed with Dell, althoughit was a fantastic computer before it fried itself



nano