"David Farber" wrote in message
...
D Yuniskis wrote:
Hi David,

David Farber wrote:
I use my generic, home made, pc to test and analyze client's hard
drives. The motherboard in my pc is an ECS NFORCE3. It's never given
me any problems. When I hooked up the test drive in question (lots
of knocking noises) on the second IDE channel, the pc booted, the pc
speaker beeped once (normal for this pc), but it just froze after
that. I rebooted and tried to go into the setup menu but that didn't
work either. I gave up on the test and removed the drive I was
checking. But now, the same problem occurs. The pc powers up,
speaker beeps, and it freezes there. If I press "delete" to enter
setup, it just hangs without going into setup. If I remember


Sorry if the description wasn't clear. Let me try to list the chain of
events.

1. Pc works fine with Seagate drive as master drive on first IDE channel.
2. Installed another hard drive to test as master on secondary channel.
3. Pc freezes while trying to list attached drives. Cannot access bios
screen.
4. I remove the drive on the secondary channel.
5. At some point I think I was able to get into the bios menu after
removing the test drive but at that point, it indicated no drive was
present.
6. After a couple of more tries, I cannot get to the bios menu anymore.
7. I tried different jumper settings on the Seagate drive and clearing the
CMOS. This didn't solve the problem.
8. Substituted another drive just to see if the Seagate drive was causing
the problem. No problems with a different drive installed. Drive is
recognized properly.


I.e., WITHOUT DRIVE your PC is not operating properly!

correctly, immediately after removing the test drive, I was able to
get to the bios menu but it said no drive was installed. I used the
internal clear CMOS jumper to reset the bios but the outcome was the
same. Now, I am not even able to get that far. If I put in any other
drive, I am able to access the bios menu and the drive is recognized
correctly. I was not having any

A few sentences ago, you claimed the PC doesn't get to BIOS with the
"bad" drive disconnected. Now it *does* (with a different drive)?
Are you sure your descriptions are consistent?

problems with the drive before adding the test drive on the
secondary IDE channel. I can feel the motor humming when the machine
is powered up. I've tried switching between "cable select" and
"master=on, slave =off," that didn't help. There are no clicking or
foreign noises. I was hoping to purchase a used drive of the same
model and swap out the controller boards. My question is, how close
of a match do these boards have to be? So far I have found the same
drive model number and firmware code, but a different HDA p/n.
Anyone have any luck doing a swap like this? Is there some
identifying data on the hard drive platters themselves that would
cause the drive to "disappear" like this? I did try the drive in
another pc. It gave a similar error, "Drive not detected," and asked
if I wanted to bypass the detection process.

My own experience with Seagate drives has not been good!

A while back I bought 2x 400Gb drives from Maplin, it was a while before I
unpacked them so there's no chance of returning them.

The one I have used so far worked OK for about a month then had a read
access error while viewing a pdf, re-booting resulted in pretty much what
you describe.

With a bit of persevering I got the PC to boot normally without the dodgy
Seagate, then with a lot more I got it to start with the Seagate back on
again - but it started in blue screen/CHKDSK mode and trashed a load of
files before finally re-booting into Windows.

After copying the surviving data to another drive I ran Spinrite 6, on the
first run (takes a whole day!) it marked a large number of allocation units
as bad, on a second run there were no unrecoverable allocation units but the
report indicated a massive total of seek errors!

ISTR a couple of decades ago Amstrad sued Seagate because their unreliable
drives were giving the cheap crappy Amstrad PCs a bad name.

How I wish I'd not rushed to Maplin and bought the Seagates, a month later
they had 500Gb Hitachi's for about the same price.