Is my motherboard dead/dying or hard drives?

[ebay_moon]

Hi guys, may I pick someone's brain?
My video card (8800GTX) failed recently, so I installed a Radeon 5770 1GB.
It did work initially, but then I got the horrid XP Antimalware virus, so I figured this'd be a good time to do a fresh installation of XP. Now it won't even go beyond the setup screen (where I've just changed the boot order to 1st-Windows XP disc. It just sits there doing jack. It won't recognise either of my hard drives also!

Any ideas?

I'm running Asus P5B Delux m/b
6330 processor
Radeon 5770 (new)

Many thanks

 

[KingSam15]

HDD most licky

 

[ulysses35]

Do either of your hard drives show up in BIOS ? that would be my first port of call. If they do then they are working, but could still be dying. Have you tried swapping their boot order (slave or master - IDE)

 

[jsc]

Do either of your hard drives show up in BIOS ? that would be my first port of call. If they do then they are working, but could still be dying. Have you tried swapping their boot order (slave or master - IDE)

Not necessarily. The BIOS just checks the drive interface. That could be good and the BIOS would correctly detect the drives.

But if the drive internals were bad, the first sign of failure would occur when you tried to read/write to them.

 

[ebay_moon]

Thanks for the replies guys, it was indeed a f****d hard drive. I can connect a 40gig onto the end of the IDE cable and everything works fine, but if I connect the troublesome 300gig drive into the middle IDE connection, literally nothing works. If you switch the system on, it won't even boot up at all!

So now, I'll just have to try and get USB ---> IDE cable to get all my game saves off the drive - I really can't face re-doing 80% of Fallout 3!