HELP: Hard drive PROBLEMS

SportyGuy220 · Jul 26, 2004

ok, my friend just wrote this email to me and im wondering if you guys can give me some info about this.

The higher end computers today can handle above the 137 GB limit. This fairly new Compaq Presario SR1010NX computer surely disappoints me. I was looking for the jumper settings on the hard drive and realized the drive is a 40 GB 5400 rpm. My eMachine computer is a high end with a 160 GB 7200 rpm. Why in hell does Compaq use a 5400 rpm drive when most are now 7200 rpm?

There appears to be a difference between manufacturers of hard drives. Some seem to get bad sectors more often, and others crash more often. I don't have enough computers to know which are best hard drives. Now I just read on the Compaq site that computers running Windows XP Home & Professional can hang up at startup when the computer goes into hibernation mode and saves faulty settings (due to bad RAM location). Andrew's computer is only a few months old and should never had these problems.

Another issue I have with Andrew's computer is that it doesn't recognize both hard drives. Think about this and let me know if you have any solution. Both drives are ATA internal. The original drive is a Seagate Barracuda ST340015A 40 GB 5400 rpm. The add on is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X-6L060J3 60 GB 7200 rpm. I've tried setting both to cable select, then one to master and other to slave. Afterwards, I checked the BIOS where only one appears. This is strange that only one appears in the BIOS setup. When he first got the computer, I used Norton Ghost and cloned the original to the new one where I then used the new one as the main and only drive.

These drives are by different mfrs where there must be some incompatibility using them together. Or the jumper settings are different from what the web site shows. DON"T KNOW!

I loaded my new eMachines OS on Andrew's Compaq and it seemed to work. The Restore disk (3 of them) are Ghost image disk that take roughly 10 minutes a disk to restore the hard drive. All went well here.

Then it rebooted where you setup your location, time, etc and the hour glass cursor stayed for over an hour.

I just rebooted and it hangs up after entering info on the "Computer Name" screen, after the "Enter Time Zone" screen.

SportyGuy220 · Jul 27, 2004

please fellas, need alittle help on this

DMac · Jul 27, 2004

Other than trying to cut corners to build it cheaper, don't know why they would use the slower drive. Compaq isn't known for going the extra mile for performance.

Have you tried to auto-detect the drives in the BIOS? Tried plugging them into different IDE channels? The drives being made by different manufacturers wouldn't matter.

Not sure about the hanging during the OS setup. Are you sure those eMachines restore disks aren't exclusive? In other words if they're only for THAT machine, they might not work with a totally different machine.

SportyGuy220 · Jul 28, 2004

any other suggestions?

clocker2 · Jul 28, 2004

It was a terrible idea to try and use the eMachines restore disk on the Compaq.
Windows is probably going crazy trying to use drivers and hardware settings that are completely inappropriate for the Compaq.

In your friend's place, I would physically disconnect the second HDD (presumably the slower of the two), reformat the remaining drive and do a fresh install of a full version of XP (NOT the eMachine Ghost image).
After the system is up and running properly then he could reinstall the second drive and see if Windows won't recognize it.

Until he gets the PC running properly with one drive, he's kinda banging his head against the wall.

SportyGuy220 · Jul 28, 2004

ight ill report this back to him. Its not like hes not able to use a computer. He has 3 of them. But this is probly head banging.

alien dork · Jul 29, 2004

if cable selete doesn't work try to make one of them into master and the other slave. The other thing could be that one the cable could be faulty, try a different cable. is he sure that both of the hard drives work? try to connect individual hard drive to computer and confirm that they are in working condition.

HELP: Hard drive PROBLEMS

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