Hard Drive blues...

[keithejohnson]

Hello,
I just purchased and received a new Maxtor D540 120Gig drive to install into my system. I have a system that I have built myself. It contains an ABit KT7-A motherboard with an AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz processor. I have 512MB RAM, an ATI Rage Fury video card, a Soundblaster Live Platinum sound card, a Plextor CD-RW drive, a 56k modem, and NIC card, and a 300w power supply. I also have a 30Gig Western Digital hard drive. I did have a smaller second drive installed that I removed to install the Maxtor drive.

I changed the Maxtor drive to run in slave mode and connected it to the same controller and power leads that the previous drive was connected to. I am running Win 2k Pro. When I boot the pc, it recognizes each of the drives and then takes me to the Win2k sign on screen. I enter my user name and password and windows begins to load. After loading the desktop and during the first few seconds of running, the system simply reboots. I have tried this in slave mode and in cable select mode with the same result. One thing I notice is that my current drive is ATA-66 and the new one is ATA-100. Is there any issue with mixing these two? I was also wondering if it may be a power issue and disconnected my CD-RW drive and got the same result. Like I said, I had another drive running fine so I'm not sure what the problem could be.

Please let me know if you have some suggestions.

Thanks, Keith Johnson

 

[PCcashCow]

A few things, it your power supply is alright, not good but alright, you may consider upgrading it, but that doesnt seem to be the problem.
The slave/master should not be an issue really either. You could first try to format the new drive completely. Then check the bios and make sure the drive is registerd properly, and the the old 30 giger is the bootdrive. Then if you think it my be a power suppply conflict simply diconnect you cd rom(s) and boot, if you get the same error make sure that your cpu and system are not over heating causing the reboot. Once you can rule out that all your deviced are in working order, put in that win2k cd, and restore/repair windows, windows may want the drive to be ntfs be working with your system. the udma/ata 33/66 is and issue with some mobos, however in normal cases the bios will look at the lowest speed of the disk and run both disk at 33. If you have time i would maybe install win2k on the new drive, with possible a promis ata100 controller(assuming you mobo doesnt have ata 100 suport)and see if you have the same trouble, if you do then its a mobo issue. Try a couple of thses things see what you get as a result.

It seems that every time I reboot my wallet get smaller.

 

[papasmurf]

I would deffinatly reformat my hard drive if i was you, also win2000 is kinda pickey when it comes to hard drives.

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[kvondohlen]

I had the same problem with a SCSI drive, a reboot when powering up at logon screen. I tried various methods to resolve, disconnecting other SCSI devices, etc. The fix that worked for me was disconnect all HD (IDE and SCSI)except for the new drive, boot from Win2K CD, install Win2K on the new drive, shutdown and reconnect all drives, then reboot. My original install loaded the new drive, then required a reboot. Win2K then worked fine, with all drives. Since I had a SCSI drive (versus IDE) the procedure I did is different than what you have to do. You should disconnect all drives, put your problem drive on primary IDE as a master, put CD as slave, change boot order in BIOS, install Win2K, shutdown, put drives back as they were (master, slave). Very cumbersome and time demanding, but it worked for me. Hopefully this will work for you.

Also, it appears that you may have the reboot automatically option selected in the properties, advanced, startup and recovery tab. If you uncheck that, you will probably get a blue screen of death and it will give you an error code. My error code was a page fault in non paged area. Just a point of reference, as this happened to my computer.

 

[keithejohnson]

For anyone else who runs across this, here is what I did.

I disconnected the existing Primary Master drive and connected the new, unformatted drive as the Primary Master, leaving the other disconnected. I booted from the Win 2k CD and formatted and installed Win 2k on the new drive. Upon completion of this, I then reconnected the original Primary Master drive, changed the new drive to be Primary Slave and rebooted. The system now booted fine, so I reformatted the new drive and it all worked fine.

Not quite Plug-n-Play but, all in all, pretty simple.