PCTech Forums

My sister-in-law keeps me wondering why Im in this busness with her computer foes, shes the type that installs hardware and even builds a computer but doesnt know nothing about it, doesnt sound possible right? Well heres her latest:

She had a good working computer with 2 h.d.d. (maxtor) installed. She purchases 2 used computers and takes her h.d.d. out of her comp and tries booting them on these other computers. Well of course there not going to boot and puts them back in computer they came out of and now it wont reconize either of them. It wont reconize them as a slave on another computer. It will boot to A: but gets errors when typed in fdisk, says no fixed disk. Now I thought first off it was the primary controller on the board went bad but she said she hooked up the cd rom as master on primary and it detected it so there goes that theory.
So basically she got 2 h.d.d. that worked right before she took her little journey and now they are basically worthless. She cant even get her files off them.
Now my thoughts are she corrupted her h.d.d when she tried to boot them from the other computers by it loading drivers that didnt belong on there.
Does any one have any other thoughts to go on. Not much you can do with them at this point any suggestions are welcome.

*edit
I forgot to add, she does get post beep

I can't see the HDD being loaded on to another comp really effecting it booting back up on original pc.

Just take the original HDD that was Master on Primary IDE and put it back the same way,as Master on IDE1.Leave the 2nd HDD till later.

Now put a good working Win98 or Win98se Boot disk,making sure FDISK is on the Floppy.

Boot the pc Without Cd-Rom support
At th A: prompt type fdisk and see if you get in...
If you do..just View the Partition to see if its there.
If it is,reboot to BIOS...
Click Auto Detection and see if it shows up...
If it does type "Y" for yes and skip all others,save changes....reboot

If you can't get anywhere....Power down,pull the CMOS battery for 10min,then do what I said above the same way...

Try that...

Cactus

Does the hdd show up in the bios?

Was she using a drive overlay program on her system or did any of the systems she tried the hdds in have a drive overlay program?

If one of the systems she tried them in had a short then she could have damaged the hdds.

Just wanted to update you on the progress of this post:

After many attempts to get any computer to reconize her h.d.d. she decided to purchase 2 new drives. I honestly believe she fried those other 2. It wouldnt be the first time shes fried a piece of hardware. Once she fried her h.d.d. becuse she was working on it with the power on
Many cpu's went to the grave in her hands and I can rememeber a power supply being fried also.. god shes dangerous. I explained to her the saftey rules I follow while working on a pc but sorry to say one day she will learn the hard way.

This topic is closed