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6 Posts
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4804
June 13th, 2004 00:00
maxtor 540 as slave causing boot error
i'm totally stumped.
the other day, out of the blue, my computer (dell 8200, P4 1.7, 640 mb RDRAM) just wouldn't boot. restarting just gave me the F1 to reboot, F2 for SetUp
after hours on the phone with Dell, running full diagnostics that took hours, ending up with them telling me I needed a new hard drive. BIOS just wouldn't recognize the hard drive.
the machine is back up and running, but i'm not really sure why.
i pulled the maxtor slave drive out of the box, which has all my music on it. did that as a precaution and just to take it out of the mix.
finally got the machine to boot with a Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools CD. Got into DOS, ran scandsk and chkdsk and it seemed to work.
but when I tried to put the 2nd drive back in, the computer wont boot. as soon as I take it out, it boots up fine.
the drive doesn't have an OS on it, as I was using it just for storage.
where do I go from here? and why would a failure of a slave drive cause the whole system to fail? is there hope of recovering the data?
any advice is much appreciated.
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ckronengold
6 Posts
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June 13th, 2004 00:00
i should add that the maxtor drive is doing a "tick tock" type clicking sound.
ejn63
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June 13th, 2004 18:00
Yes, if the slave drive is faulty, it can prevent the master from booting.
Try disconnecting the CD-ROM drive and replacing it with the suspect drive, then rebooting. If you still have problems, the drive is likely history - and if you need the data, you'll have to evaluate what you're willing to spend to get it back (data recovery starts in the $5000 range and escalates depending on how much work and data are involved).
ckronengold
6 Posts
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June 13th, 2004 21:00
i've identified the maxtor as the problem. computer is back up and running.
i tried hooking the drive up again, this time with slave jumper config, and it caused the crash. needed to use the norton ghost bootable floppy, then the western digital bootble CD to get back up and running.
i didn't try hooking it to the seconday IDE channel, though. Is that worth trying at this point? what is the difference between hooking it up as the 2nd device on the primary channel and hooking it up to the secondary?
also, i'm REALLY annoyed with DELL. I spend hours on the phone with Bombay only to have them tell me that the main hard drive was fried and that I needed to buy a new one. how could they be so wrong? they gave me a full diagnostics thing to run (start up with num lock, caps lock, scroll lock, then alt-E, Alt-B or something like that).
Either way, I'm glad that my machine is back up and running, and wondering if its worth ti nkering to get the other drive off.
frankly, its all my music that i've ripped from my CDs. no major loss, but a major hassle.
this is the 2nd maxtor drive that has failed on me int he past 2 years. One was from Dell, one was the replacement.
Ronnietkh
103 Posts
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June 14th, 2004 03:00
I had a similar experience just two weeks ago with the F1 & F2 stuff without rhyme or reason. Anyway, I did a NVRAM >start up with num lock, caps lock, scroll lock, then alt-E, Alt-B or something like that< to no avail until I changed the IDE cable. My puter is working fine now.
Ronnie