PC wont start with added HDs

[jbourne84]

Abit IP35 Pro XE
Q6600 @2.4ghz
4gb ram
320GB HD

When i was running vista i took a 120GB HD out of its portable case and plugged it in and it worked great, i formatted it then used it for music. I attempted to add a brand new 500GB HD but this never got recognized and somewhere in moving drives around my PC stopped starting, i put everything back to normal, went into bios and chose to "start from failsafe defaults" to shed all O.C. settings and the PC went into a memory check that took forever. When i got into windows, my mouse wouldnt work(even red light was off). It wasnt until i plugged another mouse in that the auto-detect function kicked in and installed them both.

When i prepared to reformat & install windows 7 I unplugged that 120gb hard drive. Now Win7 is on there, running great for a couple weeks. I tried plugging in that hard drive again last night but the PC wouldnt even start, the lights would flash and shut right back off. so finally i unplgged the hard drive and restarted. the PC then booted into a full memory check and my mouse, again, wasnt installed when i finally made it to windows.

what am i doing wrong here!

 

[hang-the-9]

Does not seem you are doing anything wrong, looks to be an issue with the hard drive. Does the computer fail to start only with that one drive in, or with any other drive as well?

 

[jbourne84]

aside from my main hard drive with the OS on it, i only have 2 others. its probably true though that this one has been involved any time i couldnt start the PC. its a bummer because i have a lot on there i was hoping to carry over.

any idea why my mouse stops working when this happens though?

 

[hang-the-9]

aside from my main hard drive with the OS on it, i only have 2 others. its probably true though that this one has been involved any time i couldnt start the PC. its a bummer because i have a lot on there i was hoping to carry over.

any idea why my mouse stops working when this happens though?

The drive could be causing an issue with the motherboard, infact that's most likely the case. Whatever it's doing is doing bad things to the USB ports.

 

[jbourne84]

the same motherboard and hard drive used to work fine together though, is it more likely then that somethign is wrong with my motherboard? The hard drive is not SATA, it is the older connector if that makes a difference

 

[hang-the-9]

the same motherboard and hard drive used to work fine together though, is it more likely then that somethign is wrong with my motherboard? The hard drive is not SATA, it is the older connector if that makes a difference

Well, this is where proper trouble-shooting will help you. Do other drives on the same connector crash your system? If the only time you get the crash is when you use this one single drive, pretty easy to rule out other components.

I guess the trick is to have several known good items to test with.

 

[Hawkeye22]

the same motherboard and hard drive used to work fine together though, is it more likely then that somethign is wrong with my motherboard? The hard drive is not SATA, it is the older connector if that makes a difference

If it's an older PATA drive, you may need to set the master/slave jumper on it.

 

[hang-the-9]

If it's an older PATA drive, you may need to set the master/slave jumper on it.

Those jumpers would not cause the PC to shut off though, at most he would not see the drive, or maybe get a "non-system disk error".

 

[jbourne84]

i dont have any other extra hard drives(other than the SATA), i might be able to find an older computer with one i can snag for trouble shooting though

im sorta new to dealing with this, do you mind explaining what it means to set the master/slave jumper?

 

[hang-the-9]

i dont have any other extra hard drives(other than the SATA), i might be able to find an older computer with one i can snag for trouble shooting though

im sorta new to dealing with this, do you mind explaining what it means to set the master/slave jumper?

Way back in the ice ages of computers, when drive connectors were wide and monitors were fat, you had to tell the drive controler which drive was the "master" to boot from and to get the signals first. IDE channels were set up to have 2 connections each, master and slave. Generally the master has faster access times than the slave, and a boot drive, as far as I remember, HAD to be set as the master.

Those settings were selectable by jumpers near the power connector of the drive, rows of 4 2-pin connectors. You can set them as Slave, Master, CS (cable select where the placement of the drive on the IDE cable told it which was the master and which was the slave), and the 4th pin was never really used, if used was in a combination with the other 3 to set max drive size or some other custom setting.

In your case though, I highly doubt that this is what is causing your issue.

 

[jbourne84]

thanks for the explaination, i know the cable does have 2 connectors on it. right now its plugged into the mid-cable connector, not the one on the end. Dont know what is what since im at work but maybe ill try again with the other connector when im home