Problem with three hard disk - please Help!

[do_r]

Hy,
I am new to this forum and I have a big problem

I have a computer with three hard drives and one DVDRW and when I use only two of them (the harddrives) all its fine, when I use the third one too my pc begin to random crash or not starting at all.

the motherboard its a AsRock K7VT4A Pro
the processor its AMD Sempron 2400+
2x512Mb Ram

the hard drives are
Maxtor 6E040L0 << master with XP SP3 installed << 40Gb
SONY DVD RW DW-U18A << slave DVDRW
Maxtor 6Y120L0 << master --- storage << 120Gb
Maxtor 6Y080L0 << slave --- storage << 80Gb

power source 350W

what happens its
when all harddrives and dvdrw are plugged in I get random crash from XP bluescreen of death followed by computer restart and hangup at startup because it not find my hd (the master with OS installed on) the only solution its to cut the power and restart the pc. If I not cut the power fisically it continues to not find my first hard drive
sometimes the pc is not starting even.
If I unplug one of the storage harddisk (ex- now I unplugged the 120Gb) the sistem works well.

What could it be the problem?

Thank you very much and please forgive my bad english.

 

[chunkymonster]

Welcome to the Forums!

Did you recently install the 3rd hard drive? Is this something that just started happening? Did you verify the jumpers on the drives to ensure they were properly set to Master/Slave? Do you ahve the latest mobo chipset drivers? What brand/model is the power supply?

Off the top of my head, if you are getting the blue screens and restarts only after adding the 3rd hard drive, then I suspect the power supply is not supplying enough amps for the system. You may need to get a higher quality psu.

 

[do_r]

yes this start to hapen after adding the 3rd hard drive
the jumpers are set correctly but I don't know what are the mobo chipset drivers, I will make a search
the power supply its a premiere model or something, i don't know really

thank you for help

 

[mike99]

Make/model of PSU IS important, not all PSUs are equal. If it is cheap, no name and a few years old it will be most likely cause. When HDs power up they take more power than when running at correct speed.

Mike.

 

[do_r]

it is cheap, no name a some years old,
could be the power supply,
but now my computer crashed still without the third HD,
I don't know what to do.

 

[mike99]

Get a new PSU!! Get good quality 380 - 420W and see if that works, The crashes may have corrupted your OS installation. If using Windows, try starting in Safe Mode & run chkdsk c: /f on system drive.

Mike.