Crash of Secondary HDD Caused System not to boot!

Question

Hi, Recently I had a problem with my system not booting; it was very slow, and would take a couple minutes just to get to the initial WinXP screen, and the tracer line would go back and forth for a couple of minutes, while this was going on there was a clicking/clacking noise in the keyboard area. Then it would go back to the Dell logo startup screen and just cycle like this. I thought the one year old primary HDD was shot -- again. I don't have a Dell diagnostics disk, system is out of warranty, so I took it to a local repair shop with the intention of getting a new primary HDD. A heads up repair tech determined it to be not the primary HDD but the secondary HDD that had crashed and would not allow the system to boot because I can think of at least two applications I had on the secondary HDD that loaded at startup. I'm sure many of you would have picked up on this before you involved a second party; but as I indicate in my signature below, I am not too swift when it comes to computers. I just posted this for the few of you out there that are like me and thank those of you that continue to educate me in this forum daily. Message Edited by rjmat on 06-04-2005 10:35 AM

Bay Wolf · Answer

When you say secondary HDD, I assume that you are talking about the HDD in the media bay carrier.

Will it boot if you take the secondary (media bay) hard drive out?
What exactly happened? Did you do something that caused this? (software install, hardware change)

We need some more details to try and help you.

rjmat · Answer

Bay Wolf,Thanks for your lightning response.I'm sorry, as I was preparing my post, I accidently hit the key and the message was entered while I was correcting the subject line without even having started the message. My problem was resolved by having the Secondary HDD replaced. Thanks again.

Bay Wolf · Answer

That's good input for others that may experience the same problem.    I am glad that you were able to get your system running again.

GreyMack · Answer

I had been considering putting the swap/page file on a dedicated partition on the second drive, but then I began thinking of the consequences if the second drive fails. I presume it would cause a fatal error, and I'd have to replace, partition, and format the second drive before I could use the system again. I may go ahead with that tweak anyway, with the reminder that a failure of either drive may put my system out of comission.

GM

rjmat · Answer

Hi GM,You just reminded me; I did have a portion of the swap/page file assigned to a partition on the Secondary (Media Bay) HDD, so I suppose this also contributed to my not being able to boot.I had HDD #2 divided into three partitions (E,F & G) and ~1GB of the swap/page file was ascribed to the F partition. About 6 months ago chkdsk said I had a 512kb bad sector in the F partition, I suppose this was the beginning of the drive failure (I just now realized that). But when it ultimately crashed, I had very little warning -- just an intermittent barely audible clicking sound last Tue. evening, I went to 'standby' and when I tried to recover from standby Wed. morning the non-boot cycle described above began.

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