How do you tell if your slave HD died?

[Audioaficionado]

Just last weekend as I was attempting to install w2k3 above 98 & w2k on my WD 80Gb SE, things went terribly wrong. Things got so bad it wouldn't boot no matter what I did. It tested OK using the WD Data Lifeguard floppy.

So I just swapped my (both WD80GbSE) master & slave around and reinstalled both 98 & w2k. I've been in the process of picking the stuff I wanted to keep off the old drive. Just in time too.

Everything on both drives showed up as healthy partitions in w2k just last night. I didn't do any mantenance on the older HD other than move files over to the new one.

This morning I found the PC in a bootdisk failure mode. After several attemps to boot, I used my Smart Boot Manager floppy to get in to w2k. Neither the BIOS nor w2k see the older drive anymore.

If it's the HD, the non boot issue could be because the survivor was in master mode without a slave.

If the controller channel blew, wouldn't there be something about it in the BIOS boot screens? I'm going to try hooking both up separtly in stand alone mode just to see if it's really the hard drive.

Any constructive input would be appreciated.

TIA,

 

[Audioaficionado]

Every time I tried to use the Data Lifeguard tools to check both HDs, it would just black screen with no curser or text.

When I inplugged one or the other and ran it stand-alone, they both checked out. So WD is off the hook for an RMA.

Boot times with one HD is fast but several minutes trying with both in M-S on the primary IDE channel.

I'll try resetting the CMOS and trying in M-S mode again.

Anyone ever have the BIOS corrupt while in w2k?

One of my cats was also running across my keyboard last night. Could any combination of key strikes while in w2k cause a BIOS or hardware failure?

 

[Audioaficionado]

HAPPY ENDING !!!

I hooked everything back up and shorted the CMOS to return it to failsafe defaults and get rid of any potintial corruption with the old settings.

It booted fine and sees both HDs.

I was really hoping not to have to RMA my new mobo.

Thanx everyone for being here eventhough I managed to fix it before you all got home from work.

Cya on the forums.

 

[imaboutaquit]

thats funny, well, now that its working. My 2 year old managed to shut down my pc the other day by banging on the keyboard! Kinda like your cat. When I went to boot back up, NO hard drives detected. Cleared cmos and all was good. I wonder what the magical keys are?

 

[mbentley]

thats funny, well, now that its working. My 2 year old managed to shut down my pc the other day by banging on the keyboard! Kinda like your cat. When I went to boot back up, NO hard drives detected. Cleared cmos and all was good. I wonder what the magical keys are?

there must be some magical key combo that somebody only tells little kids (and my dad)