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Pentium 3 750 - Problem with hard drives

mcravenufo

mcravenufo

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My coworker has a Pentium 3 - 750.
He came to me with the problem that his old computer locks up in POST when it is detecting drives. The catalyst for the problem is when one day his CDROM drive tray would open when he would boot his computer. He would close the door and the drive would continuously spin as if a CD was inserted. He purchased a new DVD drive to replace the CDROM drive thinking that his old CDROM drive was bad. After he installed his new DVD drive he couldn't boot to his old 40Gig hard drive so he purchased a new 80 Gig hard drive and installed it.

One thing he did note is that when he was trying to install the power to his new hard drive he noticed a large spark when connecting the molex power connector.

I decided to put a 1.2Gig drive in and boot to a floppy. The computer boots in this configuration but at the command prompt you can not browse the 1.2Gig hard drive.
It detects the DVD drive just fine and we can browse it.

I reset the CMOS and that didn't help.

Any one have any suggestions?
 
The fact that it sparked, probably meant he was doing this with it plugged in. I've seen that fry the drive and the connector on the motherboard.
 
Lesson learned, don't leave the power plugged in when you are working in the computer, especially if you are swapping components.

What was on the 1.2 gig that you expected to be able to see?
 
The 1.2 Gig has Linux on it.
The drive letter for it wasn't availabe at the command prompt.

If you guys think that the power surge caused the problem I will be sure he learns his lesson. Either way I think the motherboard is screwed up because of the CDROM problems he was having at the start.
 
try to reinstal on the 40gig, and see what you get if that works, they try putting the 80 gig in as a slave, the spark may have fried the HD or more but if you get one HD to work, then any other working HD shoudl work in there, i say, clear cmos, put in the 40gig format instal, cross fingers.

good luck
 
With the 40Gig and 80Gig the computer freezes while detecting hard drives.

With the 1.2Gig the computer boots (from the floppy) but you can not browse the hard drive on the command prompt.
 
try the HDs in another rig, maybe you fried the ide on the mobo, i dont know, since you cant seem to boot from the HDs at all, you can also try using your secondary ide for your HDs and see if that helps at all, sorry i cant give you more, but try that out and get back to us on it
 
the hd controller is probably fried. It happened to me a while ago. I installed a cdrom drive while the system was on and i saw a spark. Lucky for me only the cdrom drive fried and not the mobo hd controller.
I learned one thing, drives are not hot swappable :D
 
try one of those pci ide controllers this may help them save money so they dont have to buy a new mobo. i belive they are relatively cheap
 
Thanks for the input guys.
I will get back to him on Monday that his IDE controller is probably fried.
 
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