Computer Crashed

[intocomputing2]

This morning when I turned on the machine I got an error that says:

"DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER"

I got the recovery disk and proceed it to insert it and while it seemed to start loading it suddenly stopped and gave me this message instead:

"Cannot find hard drive"

"Confirm if hard drive is correctly connected"

I proceeded to open the case and check the cables and connections from and to the hard disks and everything seemed to be fine, after this I decided to try a tool such as winternals and see if it would load at all, which it did, however in the "my computer" options of the program none of the 2 hard disks showed up, as if the computer wouldn't have any installed. After that I tried the program Gparted, but in this case the program didn't finish loading and instead it gave the message:

"isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards..."

and it just froze there

At this point I'm not sure if it's the hard disk or not, I thought from the beginning and from the use of the winternals tool that the hard disk may be the issue, but Gparted didn't even complete its loading at all, let alone display info as if no drives were installed on my computer like the first program did, and that last detail also bothers me, if the problem was only the C drive, why didn't winternals show my second drive? could it be something else like the mobo?

Anyone knows by any chance what could be the problem?

Edited August 11, 2009 by intocomputing2

[TheTerrorist_75]

Possible bad IDE/SATA cables, bad IDE/SATA ports or power supply weak/failing.

[martymas]

did you check the bios

and see if your boot order was from the hdd

if it is set to the cdrom or floppy

it will show a boot disk error

or you may need to repair

some where in the tips section it tells you how to repair

good luck

marty

Edited August 12, 2009 by martymas

[TheTerrorist_75]

Disk boot failure

[intocomputing2]

My boot start up menu is configured as:

CD/DVD Drive

Floppy Drive

Hard Drive

but int the boot menu the hard drive appears as "none"

[darthvader]

1. Open the computer, take the hard drive out

2. Find another computer and swap the hard drives, does this still cause a problem?

2A. An alternative to swapping the hard drives (if you don't have an extra computer) is to buy the following equipment from newegg, and attach it to another computer via usb. Does it show up?

If the hard drive doesn't show up after option 2 then try option 2A, and recover the files you wish to recover and then reformat your harddrive by right clicking the removable drive and click format NTFS (not quick).

After the reformat try putting it back into your computer and reinstalling XP. Does it work? If not its a bad hard drive.

If it does work then great. If option 2 works, then we'll go from there.

Edited August 12, 2009 by darthvader

[martymas]

normaly if you cant see your hdd

is a sign

that the drive needs to be formatted

or you may have dislodged connections

check the power lead to the hdd

and make sure it is secure

some trimes a crash will

reset the boot order settings

and you have go in and reset it to the hdd

and not the cd rom or the floppy

marty

[TheTerrorist_75]

Download the correct hard drive diagnostic software for your drive and test it. These are DOS based and can be booted from floppy or CD depending on what one you download. For the CD version you will need to have your burning software create a bootable CD.

Hitachi/IBM

Samsung

Seagate, Maxtor, Quantum

Western Digital

[intocomputing2]

I think you guys may have been right on the power supply thing, it doesn't even turn on now. I tried it turn it on one more time to see if I could check the brand of hard drive on the bios, and it started to take a while to even show the intel logo, so I pressed the power button again to turn it off, and when I pressed it back to turn it back on, it went dead it doesn't even turn on now

I'm going to bed, I'll check back tomorrow.

Edited August 13, 2009 by intocomputing2