Saturday, April 07, 2007

HARD DISK TROUBLESHOOTING

The drive does not spin up and the drive light doesn't illuminate during power-up.

Make sure the hard drive power connector and ribbon cable are connected.
Swap the hard drive.
You see drive activity, but the computer will not boot from the hard drive.
Make sure that the hard drive power connector and ribbon cable are connected.
Run the BIOS setup program and make sure the drive and the controller are enabled. Also, make sure the drive has the correct parameters; most likely you can try the auto detect feature.

For IDE drives, check the jumper settings of all of the IDE devices, especially the master, slave or stand-alone jumpers.
For SCSI drives, check the jumper settings of all SCSI devices. Make sure the primary hard disk is set to SCSI ID 0. Check during POST to see if the SCSI BIOS is loading and finding any SCSI devices. If not, check the host adapter installation including IRQ, DMA and I/O settings.

Make sure all device drivers have been installed correctly.
Swap the controller card, cable and hard drive, one at a time.
If the drive spins up, but the system fails to recognize the drive. Or if there is a "No Fixed Disk Present" or "Error reading fixed disk" error message on the monitor. Or if the following error messages indicate the computer cannot find an operating

system to boot:
Non-System disk or disk error, Replace and strike any key when ready
No ROM Basic
Disk Boot Error, Replace and Strike Key to Retry
DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER
BOOT: Couldn't find NTLDR, Please insert another disk
If you are trying to boot from the hard drive, make sure there is no disk in drive A.

If you are trying to boot from the floppy disk drive, try to boot from the hard drive and try to access the floppy disk. Then try to make sure that the disk has the necessary boot files and that the necessary boot files are not corrupt.
If you are trying to boot from the floppy disk drive, try to boot from another bootable floppy disk.

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