Hard drive failure/motherboard failure?

[Bugsy_malone 666]

Well, I plugged my old failing drive into my machine, it booted no problems ( the battery has been unplugged from my motherboard for about 3 days) downloaded a bios upgrade direct from the gigabyte site which i eventually got to do something, plugged my new drive back in and it seems to be working ok at the moment, done a full virus check with antivir and nothing has been detected so who knows, will have to keep an eye on things though for a bit.

the drive did come in a packet saying made in china! even though it was from novatech.

see how things go but its working at the moment.

[nathan123]

Most electronics are made in china lol. And it sounds like your problem may be solved, keep us posted though

[Bugsy_malone 666]

Day ermmmm something or other...

its still working only I have found a new problem which I hadnt noticed the other day.

As stated in my spec I run 2 hard drives a 250gb storage drive and an 80gb main drive which holds windows on. So the idea being the `my documents` is located on the 250gb storage (d used it last friday to transfer some photos but not since, then obviously noticed the problem that i stated in the start of this post but havent accessed my D: drive since I did the bios flash/had a problem.

today I come to transfer my photos from a show I went to and it said disc full, which to start with i thought was because I plugged the camera in then unplugged it again quickley, several reboots later still nothing!

windows says cannot read D: data corrupt or unreadable, yet a week ago pre bios update(least i think it was sucessful) it was working fine. I went to disk management and it said disk was healthy but didnt register a file system (should be NTFS though) i set the partition as active still it wont read it.

any ideas as this is driving me nuts and i dont like the prospect of data loss(already lost a little data when transfering from my dying drive before)

many thanks for all your help.

[Mickha]

Is it an EIDE connection or SATA?
If it is EIDE try disconnecting any CD/DVD drives and have just your two hard drives connected, each using a separate cable, and make both master.
Then boot up and see if it is recognised.

[Bugsy_malone 666]

EIDE.

tried what you said, still no joy its reporting `the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable`

plugged the drive into another machine and still the same problem although it said the drive was inaccessable, the only thing I can see is that when I go to disk manager under admin tools C: drive says NTFS file system D: has nothing.

I had this problem before but I have no idea how it happened.

any ideas?

[Mickha]

Is it being read by the BIOS at boot up?

[Bugsy_malone 666]

Yeah the bios can see it, have only had one instance in the past few weeks where it saw no drives at all, but last friday it was fine.

[Mickha]

The only problems I've ever experienced like this was when on hard drive was formatted using NTFS and the other FAT 32.
Have you got them set to Master and Slave or Cable Select?
Have both hard drives got Operating Systems on them? If so try booting up into the second hard drive, but remove all other EIDE connections first, and see what message you get.

[Bugsy_malone 666]

well basically my 80gb HD was installed after the 250gb HD and i realised that the 250gb had been formatted to FAT32 i then screwed up the file format of the 250 somehow, the 80gb was formatted by windows as NTFS and the 250 wasnt playing ball even though your supposed to be able to read fat 32 with NTFS windows so I ended up formatting as NTFS as well, so for the past 2-3 weeks all has been fine 80gb formatted as windows NTFS and 250gb as NTFS, then something screwed up and isnt working. I updated the bios and have only just noticed that now the 250gb isnt being read for some reason, yet last friday prior to all the problems listed at the begining of this thread it was fine.

[Mickha]

Do you have Windows XP loaded on the 250GB hard drive?
If so you could try booting from an XP disk and using the repair option, remove the cable connections to the 80GB hard drive first.