Odd HDD Behavior

[_Durandal_]

Everyone here is always extremely helpful, so I thought I'd bring this "oddity" to you guys so you could have at it.

Situation:
My mom's computer appears to act about as random as random gets. See below...

Occasionally, when the computer is powered up the PC speaker will make the sickest sounding beep I have ever heard. Mind you, this is not a normal BEEP, rather this is a distorted, weird drawn out BEEP. Imagine slowing down time for a second or two...that's the slow elongated sound I hear.

When this happens, the OS generally tends not to boot. Instead, a message such as "Boot Failure" or "Failed to Initialize Disk" appear. After hitting reset, everything boots just fine. Up to this point, I have run Maxtor's HDD utility three different times (within a few months of each other). It has passed the advanced tests every single time .

Background to Problem:

Up until six months ago, my mom was using the following parts:
Celeron 300A
128MB PC100 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G200 AGP
Tyan Tsunami ATX Motherboard (Slot 1)
Maxtor 40GB 7200rpm HDD
Generic 250W PSU
Windows 2000 Professional

Above just lists the necessary components for this thread. Anyhow, almost every time she'd turn on the computer you'd hear the fans spin up and the hard drive seemed delayed in turning on. Most times it would boot, but on occasion, it would give the "Boot Failure" message. It almost seemed like the "Power Good" signal wasn't working properly from the motherboard to the PSU. Her hardware was old anyhow, and she definitely needed something new. So, I purchased the following parts:

Sempron 2200+
512MB Mushkin PC 3200 DDR
Abit NF7-S rev. 2
GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB AGP
Maxtor 40GB 7200rpm HDD <----------- Same drive as in the above system.
Antec TruePower 480W PSU
Windows XP Professional

Granted, the system has booted fine for the past six months and only recently started showing symptoms again. The only two items that were not changed were the case (i.e. the same power button is being used...not sure if that's the culprit), and the Maxtor 40GB hard drive.

Editorial:
At this point I am simply baffled as to why it exhibits this problem. Windows XP's event viewer doesn't show any signs that the HDD is failing, nor does S.M.A.R.T. In the past, when I had Windows 2000 Professional installed, event viewer would show the message "HDD Controller 1 Possible Failure" or something like that essentially telling me to back stuff up as it would fail soon. Well, this lasted for almost two years and never died (yeah I know, should have upgraded her system long ago , that's another story).

So, what's your take on the situation fellas? Let me know if I missed anything and I'll gladly post back to try and figure this ghost problem out. Thanks!!

 

[BillR]

Have you pulled the motherboard power plug and looked at the contacts? Are any of them starting to turn black or dark in color? A poor connection can cause this.

What your describe sounds more like a power problem then anything else. Check the molex to the HD as well for the same things.

If you have a voltmeter check your 12v rail on boot as well.

Does the Hard Drive spin up sounding "uneven", if so then it might be a drive issue.

Just some thoughts. These problems are always fun to try to find

 

[_Durandal_]

Sorry, I would have gotten back to you sooner, but didn't receive an e-mail notification.

Anyhow, I will definitely check out the connector ends to see if anything is blackened. I do also have a voltmeter so I'll also check the startup voltage.

I guess the best way to describe the HDD is as follows: It spins up just fine (sounds exactly like any other normal hard drive with the increasing RPM of the platters). However, it happens after ten or fifteen seconds...way after the CD-ROM and Memory are initialized. Once it jumps past the initial POST screen, the HDD spins up. So, in short, it's severely delayed.

Thanks for responding!