Something wrong with IDE 0 or 1 (I think)?

Byron172Byron172 Adelaide, South Australia Member
edited July 2008 in Hardware
This one has me a bit baffled :confused:

A friend of my mum brought her PC to me the other day saying that it wouldn't boot up. She said thew error was "something like IDE error". I don't know because I booted it up first go......

Anyway, I ran a disgnostic tool called Astra32 to give me an idea of the HDD health. It crashed when it got to detecting IDE drives the first time around but when it ran the second time round it loaded fine. The diagnosis was "Good" health.

I had the second HDD unplugged throughout all of this as I thought this may have been the original problem. Anyway I plugged the secondary in and the program crashed again, but then ran on second try. The HDD health for the secondary drive is "Bad". Through all of this the PC never once refused to boot up. I have rebooted at least 10 times.

The other thing I've noticed when going through her System Restore points is that last week (around the time this started happening) System Restore refers to "Remove Asus ACPI driver" and on a few of the dates prior "Software Distribution Srvice 3.0". I don't know if this gives any clues as to the problem or not......

Thanks for any help........

Comments

  • QeldromaQeldroma Arid ZoneAh Member
    edited June 2008
    Could be some early symptoms....

    Give this locally syndicated procedure a go and let us know how it turns out.
  • Byron172Byron172 Adelaide, South Australia Member
    edited July 2008
    Thanks so much, this will be a great tool to have in my kit. Much appreciated. I will try it out tonight.

    BTW - I tried rebooting earlier today with both drives plugged in and BIOS seemed to freeze up when trying to detect the HDD's. When I unplugged the secondary drive I had no issues, so I figure it is definitely an issue with the slave. I've backed up all the data from the suspect drive and will leave it up to her if she wants to get another secondary drive or not......thanks again. :)
  • Byron172Byron172 Adelaide, South Australia Member
    edited July 2008
    AAAAARGH!!!!.....I gave the PC back to her last night because it booted fine at least 10 times for me once the second HDD was unplugged, and she just called me then saying it now either won't boot or when it does it only stays booted for a couple of minutes before crashing and restarting.........should I be looking at other hardware like the ram or the actual IDE ribbons or is this barking up the wrong tree? I didn't run the HDD diagnostic tool because I didn't get time (she needed it back ASAP) and plus it was running fine for me!!! :banghead:
  • QeldromaQeldroma Arid ZoneAh Member
    edited July 2008
    Hmmm. I'm now actually having another suspicion. PSU dying? Sounds like a second hard drive loads it down and kills it and the system seems to be on the edge with one.

    Got one (of equal or greater rating) you can try?
  • Byron172Byron172 Adelaide, South Australia Member
    edited July 2008
    Good thinking......I will try with my spare PSU. Lucky - I was just about to give it to my mate whose PSU died a couple of days ago!!!

    Thanks again for helping me out.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited July 2008
    Please let us know how it goes.
  • Byron172Byron172 Adelaide, South Australia Member
    edited July 2008
    OK this is weird. I just went round there and sure enough the PC was frozen just after the initial BIOS screen where it detects the HDD and goes into (is it POST?) screen where it asks for BOOT FROM CD etc.........{FROZEN} but CTRL ALT DELETE did restart, so keyboard is still getting a response.

    So I power down, unplug the power from the HDD and plug it into a different molex power plug (from the same power supply) and hey presto it boots up a charm. I did this 10 times without fail......something tells me that I haven't heard the last of this one though......:confused:
  • kryystkryyst Ontario, Canada
    edited July 2008
    That's your answer. Either the PSU is powerful enough to run that system, but it's dying or the PSU is under powered for that system and there are to many devices being powered off the same series of connectors.
  • Byron172Byron172 Adelaide, South Australia Member
    edited July 2008
    I'll swap it out for 450 watts...currently uses 300 watts, and see how it goes. It might even just be that particular molex plug as it felt a bit dodgy....but the same amount of drives are being powered up (just the primary and the ROM) in both scenarios....
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