Is the disk dead?

[Almek]

Hi

My hard disk refused to work 3 days ago. It's not detected by the bios, and does not spin up.

The thing is that sometimes it does detect something, but it shows as a space and three dots. When i managed to get into bios settings when it happened, it showed no text for the primary master.

Also, sometimes the hdd light flashes, not randomly and not connected to what i'm doing.

I have been messing with this for 3 days now. This far I have reset/cleared cmos like the mb manual instructed, tried it with different settings, used other cables, switched the drive's pins and replaced the drive with an old Quantum Fireball using the exact same cables and that worked.

So it would seem that the problim lies with the disk.
Could it be that there is a problem elsewhere? And is it possible to get it working again?

here's my workhorse:
CPU: Intel Celeron 2600MHz/128kB FSB 400MHz, Soc. 478, inbox
MB: Shuttle AV49VN Soc.478/P4x400/8x/533/ATA133/H/U2.0/L
RAM: 256MBDDRAM 400MHz PC3200
GPU: VGA 128MB Canyon 9200SE, 166/400, TV-Out, DVI, 8x, Retail
HDD: 80GB Samsung SP0802N FDB UDMA133/8,9/7200/741/2MB
CD-RW, FDD, Case and a cable
Didn't say it's a good one :roll:

Anyways, please help.

 

[Guest]

Sounds pretty dead to me since it's not spinning. What you can do besides messing with the bios is changing cables and try another port on the mobo.

 

[Zorg]

My guess is that your drive is toast. before you throw it away you should test it in another machine as a slave. If that isn't possible then buy a new drive off of Newegg etc. and put it in your computer and see if you can see it in BIOS, load Windows etc. Then put your drive in the computer as a slave and see if you can access it. If you can't then it's toast. If it doesn't spin up that's a bad sign.

 

[Almek]

Well, thanks for the replies guys. I already went and bought a 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST-something. Put it in, ran it once, got detected, restarted and changed some BIOS. Good, then it took some time to get them both in, had to switch to make the cables run right. Started it up, BAM! , S.M.A.R.T. ........ on 2 lines.

Seems that now the Samsung works, yay! Now i have to figure out how to get the Seagate to work properly. So off to formating and partitioning

Anyways thanks again

 

[Guest]

yeah. well done.