harddrives and ide cables

[Rutkus]

ok, i'm having a weird problem installing a new 120 gig hd on my "rig 2" in my sig.

its a brand new WD 120gb 7200 2mb hd. I keep getting "disk read error" and losing all my information. I have read around, and there is no real conclusive answer to this question.

I tried 2 different ide cables, now there is a possibility that both ide cables are bad but....one was in a working box. are there different types of ide cables that are only compatible with certain hd types. and if so how do you tell?

whats weird is i am able to go all the way through installing windows, the first time this happened i had windows, all updates, and software installed, with multiple restarts, now i just re-installed windows and it started acting weird when i was installing sound drivers, so i restarted and now i get the same "disk read error" after bios. if its cable then why would the drives show up in bios? anyone had any similar problems?

[tuskenraider]

Any IDE cable should be compatable with your drive, but if you were to use a 40-pin instead of an 80-pin you would only be able to run at ATA33 instead of ATA66 or higher. I'd just make sure your using an 80-pin cable, maybe newer drives may have a problem with a 40-pin, you never know. If a good cable doesn't fix your problem, and your BIOS is set to auto for HDD detection, and jumpers are set correctly, I'd get a replacement. Then if it happens again, you can start addressing more solutions. Or you could put it in your main rig and do an install and see what happens there.........should only take an hour tops to do that. Probably a rarity to get a bad drive from the get-go, but after doing the above simple steps, returning for a new one can eliminate the "I don't really know if I have a good drive" factor, as getting two bad drives in a row would be slim to none.

[Chief]

Only time I ever had a read disk error when installing a new hd was when I forgot to make a partition.But since you got as far as you did I would think it wasn't that in your case.

[Rutkus]

well, i had a bad drive the first time, i had a similar error, but i rma'd the drive, and i got a brand new one from somewhere else, are you saying get a replacement hard drive or cable?

[deeman]

i had a problem with a wd 80gig 7200rpm and winxp after using fdisk then going to install winxp on it it kept coming up with errors in the copying setup so i had to install windows on my old hdd then format the 80 in xp then go back out and reinstall on the 80 for some reason winxp does not like new drives.

[Rutkus]

you installed it with fdisk? so you formatted the 80gig hd as a secondary drive on another computer, then you reformatted it and installed windows?

what really ****es me off about it, is when i go to re-install windows, it acts like there is an unknown partition even, it knows there is space allocated there, but the partition is "unknown"

ok, that may work, i have been using the "quick" format when installing windows, maybe it needs a full format to get its juices flowing. I'll try that when i get home, out of curiosity, have you had problems since then? did it format all the way?

[tuskenraider]

If this is actually your second HDD, same model, and you are having the same problem......then there is obviously another issue at work here, not a bad drive. When reinstalling Windows, use D to delete all the partitions on the drive so you have one large unallocated space and then recreate the partition(s) with a full format for each. You may also want to try the other IDE channel for the hell of it as well..........might have a faulty connector.

[Rutkus]

solved my problem if someone searches for this thread in the future sometime, i just did a full format 3 times and then reinstalled, seemed to solve the problem, just thought i would conclude this for future reference