messiah

Had to look at failed PC the other night, which just seemed to stop working for no reason, one minute it was on and the next it wasn't.

At boot up, there's no hdd listed - I've yet to try a different drive plugged in to see if that works, but I'm after other possible reasons to check out before I tell the owner she'll have to fork out for a new hard disc.

Any ideas?

Hobo_Jojo

does it chug? one of my hdd's seemed to die the other day, it was chuggin when pc booted and wouldnt get detected. so i unplugged the power thing from the back of the hdd and plugged it back in and it worked again..

messiah

tried that.

when you first press power, you can hear a couple of clicks, but nothing gets detected. Also tried a power lead to HDD that was on the CD drive that did work to try and rule out a power problem

Hobo_Jojo

hmm try the drive in a different pc?

i had an old hdd die on me, took it to a mates whos a boffin and it wouldnt work on his either so i boxed it up and put it in the back of my wardrobe (im a cleptomaniac) decided to get it out one day and plugged it into my pc n it magically worked again and is still working now weird

barrybudden

Is it present when you open the bios?

Make a boot disk and put fdisk.exe on it, cann you see the drive in it?

Go to the manufactures web site they may have some diagnostics you can download.

messiah

cant see the disc in bios.

also tried the win xp setup, and it doesnt see it either.

Jye

You could also try the hard drive on the secondary IDE as master using a new IDE cable.

messiah

jye - I did think of that but didnt try it as the cables & sockets on the motherboard were colour-coded, and thought I wouldn't make a difference. The primary eide connector and hdd are udma100 and these were blue - the secondary was black.

I'll give it try next time all the same - cheers mate.

Da Booga

Is it an IBM Deskstar by any chance? I've had a couple fail on me and if you search the web they're notorious for failing.

Not much help but may prevent you from buying another