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
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
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.

Thanks for your reply.
--
David Farber
David Farber's Service Center
L.A., CA