What happened?

[onewheeldoin200]

Okay, I was playing with cpu stepsizing in my bios, set it first to 166mhz (from 133) and when it quit booting to windows I set it to 150mhz. I left all other bios options the same as before. After trying to reboot, I get an error message "Disk read failure. Press ctrl alt del to restart". This message comes on just before windows starts loading. The drive seems to be detected just fine right at initial startup.

Now, I tried booting with a cd, and that worked fine, so I tried swapping the cd/hd ide channels (1 and 2 respectively). Nope, cd still worked, hd didn't. Okay, so I tried swapping power cables from the cd/hd. Same result. I then plugged in an old maxtor drive I had kicking around (no boot data on it) and got the message "Disk boot failure. Insert system disk and try again".

What the hell happened? Is my drive gone for good?

The odd thing is I've never had a drive crap out instantly like that. It always gives me problems first. For the record it's a WD Caviar 205BA (yeap its like 10 years old, but it outlived 2 maxtors and a seagate).

Any advice/light shed on the situation would be met with tears of joy.

edit: the mobo is a soyo dragon kt333 ultra, running an athlon xp 2800 barton

 

[Frosty_axe]

So, you were overclocking and your drive stopped working.. did you try dropping all the settings back to what they should be (un overclocked)?

I'm not sure about your particular motherobord but if it does not have a pci/agp lock you may have pushed you ide controller too hard and caused it to corrupt your drive.

 

[Major_A]

Reset your CMOS and clock everything back to stock.

 

[onewheeldoin200]

Reset your CMOS and clock everything back to stock.

Already tried both of these. Nothing

edit: I'm at my gf's house now and I'm going to try popping the drive into her comp to see if it's readable at all. Will report back *crosses fingers*

 

[onewheeldoin200]

Ooooookay. Set the jumper to slave and popped the drive into my gf's computer. When the computer booted it did the windows 2000 chkdsk thing. It said:

G: vol label: ?
Corrupt master file table. chkdsk aborted.


When it finally got into windows it promptly restarted itself, so I took the drive out.

Okay, so the drive is screwed, we've got that covered. However, is there any way to retrieve my pertinent data on this drive (other than super pricey data recovery)?

 

[TheMostWantedPolishTwin]

I can tell you what happened..
When running at 166 Mhz FSB your PCI bus was running at 33 MHz (1/5 divider) when you set the FSB to 150 Mhz the PCI bus was set to 37,5 MHz (1/4 divider) and the HD crapped out..

 

[onewheeldoin200]

I can tell you what happened..
When running at 166 Mhz FSB your PCI bus was running at 33 MHz (1/5 divider) when you set the FSB to 150 Mhz the PCI bus was set to 37,5 MHz (1/4 divider) and the HD crapped out..

Can someone explain why this caused the problem?

 

[whitewale]

Ever drove a stick shift? Same thing as switching into 3rd gear at 120 mph. You're going over the little red line on your tachometer and - puff. You PCI buss fed data faster then your 10 year old HD could handle, and the heads wrote some crap - unfortunately in the boot sector. If you're running a FAT partition you can try fdisk -mbr to fix it. Under NTFS, you'll need some form of recovery utility, there was a thread a week back where several free utilities where mentioned.