Bad Hard Drives

[Anarchist4000]

Ok i'm wondering if anyone is familiar with any problems like this. My brother had some drive problems and I've been looking into fixing them but I'm not entirely sure what is going wrong. One drive clicks and the BIOS can't figure out what it is. My guess is a simple dead drive, hell it's a deathstar to begin with. It will make a series of 5 clicks and then pause for a while. It keeps repeating this endlessly.

The second problem that didn't make sense is that a second drive which should be 22GB is now showing up as 2.1GB? It was working after the first one died but has since lost most of it's capacity. I'm talking about the size the BIOS is reading as well. The BIOS detects it just fine but reads it as a 2.1GB drive which doesn't make a whole lot of sense out of some sort of firmware problem. Windows sees the drive as 2.1GB of raw data.

To make matters worse a third drive, all in the same system, wasn't showing up in the BIOS either. My best guess is the mobo is simply shot. There haven't been any storms or electrical problems it just died one night and was giving a bunch of disk I/O errors.

So first thing I did was hook them up to a different system to see what the drives did. The fist still clicked, the second was still 2.1GB, and the third was just fine. Disks 1 and 3 make some sense but how the second got reduced to 2.1GB I don't have a clue.

Any ideas?

 

[WGSquallx2002]

You can try to double check the jumper settings (even if the drives were working before with the way the jumpers were set), you can try to double check your cables (IDE) to see if they are bent or severely uneven (in that case you may want to try to replace the data cable to see if it helps). You can also simply swap out the old IDE cables and see if a new set will help. Hope that helps

 

[Anarchist4000]

I've replaced the cables and double checked the jumpers as well as changed them. I get the impression the IDE controller on the mobo is seriously messed up. The 3 IDEs have serious issues on that computer and 1 of the drives works fine on another. There are also 2 SATA drives attached to that computer and they appear to still be working fine. The question is how much damage can a bad IDE controller do to a drive.