Page 1 of Help! I`ve done something bad with my PC!!!

I was doing some work on my PC yesterday and appear to have done something bad to it!

I firstly installed an extra 512Mb of RAM, to give a grand total of 1Gb. I restarted my PC and everything was fine, the memory was recognised and all was running OK.

I then switched off again. I have a DVD burner and a second DVD-ROM drive, and to upgrade the burner`s firmware it needs to be set as the Master drive on that IDE channel. At the time it was the slave drive, so I just switched the drives over by moving the jumper settings as as appropriate.

I restarted the PC and instead of Windows loading, I got (what I assume) was a screen showing the BIOS settings in DOS, with the field where you enter the CPU`s speed highlighted. The setting in the field was 1050, so I just kept it as that, and Windows then loaded as usual. Both the drives were recognised and worked as usual, with no apparent problems.

I then thought "hand on, my processor`s faster than that" so I restarted and got back to the settings screen by pressing DEL during startup. I then changed the CPU speed to 1400 and continued to load windows.

As windows was booting I got a very strange, nasty-sounding buzzing noise coming from the speakers and an error message (which I stupidly didn`t make a full note of) - the last line of the message was "Recovery was successful". My PC then froze completely.

I reset the power and Windows now won`t boot at all, I get past the first DOS screen and get a message which reads "A disk read error occured, press ctrl-Alt-delete to restart". Doing this does restart the PC but I just get back to the same error message. I`ve reset the CPU setting to 1050 but it doesn`t make any difference. I`ve tried several restarts, but with no joy.

Can anyone help? I think I may have a fatally damaged hard drive...

Motherboard = Asus A7V 266-E
CPU = AMD Athlon 1600XP
Main hard drive is 40Gb
(I also have a slave drive of 120Gb)
OS = Windows XP Pro.

Sounds like you might have blown you processor.

The first thing you should do is remove all you IDE devices except the drive that has the XP operating system on it and make sure the IDE cable is connected flush at both ends. Start your PC and hit DEL to view you bios. See if your hard drive has been detected. If so, set you bios to defaults, exit the bios and see if windows starts. If not, post what message you recieve.
If it does boot properly, add one device at a time to find out which one is causing the problem, if any.

Cheers - I`ll let you know how I get on! It might be tomorrow, though, when I get back to my work PC. :/

I don`t suppose it is something as silly as leaving a floppy in the drive cos that gives a drive error and won`t load windows.

The Dodge

Quote:
Sounds like you might have blown you processor.

Surely if you have blown the processor your machine wouldn`t do anything, never mind display an error message?

Is it not more likely that he has changed one of the BIOS settings incorrectly? Or the BIOS has somehow become corrupt. Sounds to me like the HD has failed or is set up incorrectly.

I personally would go in and set the machine to boot from CD. Pop the XP disc in (you do have that I take it?) and see if it works. If so, you know it is the harddrive that isn`t working correctly.

Right, today`s update. I spent last night unplugging various IDE items until I eventually just had the main hard drive plugged in and none of the others. I still got the "disk read error occured" error message, although the BIOS still recognised the hard drive.

This morning before work I had a flash of inspiration and set my slave hard drive as the master, and left my old master drive unplugged. No error message!!! I got past the initial startup screen and got a message telling me to "press a key if I wanted to reboot". I didn`t have time to take it any further, but it looks as if my main hard drive is indeed shagged and needs replacing. Or does anyone else have any other ideas?...

I also tried booting from the Windows XP CD, but I`m not sure if I did it correctly. I got a message reading "setup is inspecting hardware configuration", then the screen went blank, the HD light went on permanently and nothing else happened.

That certainly sounds like your Hard Drive is the weakest link - with just the `faulty` drive in, make sure it is set to master not cable select and that the IDE cable is definitely the right way around and plugged into IDE 0 on the motherboard.

Just to make sure it is the drive that is faulty have you got a spare PC or can you go round to a mates house and try sticking the drive into their machine and making sure that same problem occurs?

Like you say, if BIOS finds the drive, then the XP disc will expect it to be there and if it isn`t working properly that could well hang it up. You did leave it for a while didn`t you? XP can take a good few minutes to check your system configuration.

This item was edited on Friday, 28th May 2004, 09:57

Hi. I`ve got a mate who`s coming round this evening who`s got some software which can, apparently, tell if a drive`s shagged or not.

I had the drive set as "cable select" when I was playing with them, so I might need to try that again. I left it about half an hour when doing the boot from CD, and nothing happened. I think I might have done that wrong though, as the only way I could see to boot from CD in the Bios was to disable the hard drive :/ .

I`ve got a feeling I might be spending the weekend putting in a new C drive and re-installing eveything!

Each disk manufacturer will have a utility that will run diagnostics on their hard drives. Most of these will run from a floppy disk. So get to your disk manufacturers web site and download!
As an added precaution also make sure that you now use a different IDE cable when you connect the drive tonight, to elimate the slight chance that the cable may be faulty.
What you would want to do is have your drive as master, your CD as slave and in your bios change the 1st boot device to "floppy" second to "cd" third to "hard drive". This is normally done by changing the "boot order" or "boot sequence" setting. Toggle your + - keys or page up and down to change selections.
Good luck!