I8200 hard drive failure - or not?

Question

Dear all,   I'd appreciate your help with the following...   I run an I8200 with the standard 40GB HDD (two NTFS partitions), BIOS flashed to A10 version a few months back.   I crashed XP a few days ago to the extent that I had no keyboard/mouse control at all and had to power the machine down.   On restarting, the BIOS went through POST and then displayed 'Primary hard drive not found Fixed optical drive not found No bootable devices--strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility'   Initially, I accessed the Pre-boot Assessment utility through the boot menu. Paradoxically, the DST Short Test/DST Short Status Test passed, though 'no diagnostic utility partition found' (no surprise - I'd reformatted and repartitioned in the past).   I left the machine overnight, and the next day - I guess by poor chance - powered the machine up, booting to a normal desktop but crashing on attempted start menu access. I rebooted with the boot disk of a partition utility and ran some diagnostics, yielding that both NTFS partitions had not been dismounted properly, plus some broken files on C drive. On a second attempt, I got a clean XP boot and managed to work apparently normally, backing all my data up on CD. On a third boot, CHKDSK ran and fixed a few lost clusters, but nothing else. I was hopeful this might be it.   The next day, I managed to crash XP again in a different situation, but again with the machine fully locking up. History repeated: I powered down, and the machine would not boot since. The Pre-Boot Assessment utility now complained that it couldn't find a hard drive at all.   Since then, booting has yielded variable results, from an apparently healthy boot to immediate 'I've got no hard drive' messages.   It clearly seems to be a hardware issue, but I'm wondering if getting a new hard drive will fix this or if I need to worry about other items, e.g. BIOS/controller/connections.   Any opinions would be appreciated. If you could provide links to the Dell guide to remove/install HDDs or recommend any 40GB+ drives, that'd be really great too.   Many thanks!

bacillus · Answer

Before buying any new hardware suggest that you reseat i.e. physically remove and replace, both your hard drive and your fixed optical drive then see if the problem persists.

Ed C · Answer

Also remove the optical drive from the side and see if the hard drive is recognized. This is a common problem as both the HDD and the CD drive are on the same IDE channel and if one of the drives die the BIOS will not see the other one. If after you remove and reseat both drives and the HDD is still not seen remove the CD drive and boot the PC. If the HDD is now seen and the OS boots then the CD drive is bad. If after doing that and the HDD is NOT seen then remove it and replace the CD drive and see if you can boot from that drive with a bootable CD in the drive. If you can then you know the HDD is bad. If you still can't boot from the CD drive then you have other problems and both drives may or may not be good.   In all honesty I do think the HDD went south/bad/died/bit the dust and that is what caused the hard freeze you posted about. But without doing the tests above you'll never know which drive is really the bad one. Message Edited by Ed C on 11-12-2004 06:41 PM

dj_cool · Answer

Link for taking out parts.   http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins8200/en/sm_en/hdd.htm#1084976   You can find the diags on the drivers' CD if you have it. If all goes fine, run the diags on the Hard Drive specifically and find if it needs to be replaced.

thunderchopper · Answer

I really don't know why, but at the moment things are working again as normal. I haven't really made any big changes... just flashed the BIOS, scandisk/defrag, pulled all the drives out and put them back in - and in fact, things started working again before I did all that.

I'm gobsmacked - I just don't have a sensible explanation for all that happened.

Plan: I'll buy an external firewire HDD, use a drive mirror akin Ghost and wait what happens.

Many thanks for everyone's help!!

Storage, Drives & Media

I8200 hard drive failure - or not?

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