Is my hard drive broken?

By Guth
in Hardware Hangout

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Guth

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I recently went to install Win 8 on my desktop PC, I used EaseUS partition manager to change the partitions on my C: drive.

The computer rebooted, changed the partitions then rebooted again. Now every time it gets to the very first BIOS screen it sticks at Detecting IDE drives, it does detect my HDD but it stops there.

If I unplug the drive then it will go past that screen and boot but not with it plugged in. Therefore I cant even boot to a liveCD to try format the drive or anything.

It is a 1TB Hitachi and was only bought about 11 months ago. Although It has done a lot of work, it had nearly 800GB on it and my desktop has almost 100% uptime over the last year.

Do I need a new one or is there anything I can try.

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Guth

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Why is it detecting it as an IDE drive?

Shouldn't it be connected via SATA 3?

to be totally honest I dont know, it is a SATAII drive.

IT does say SATAII on the detection, but also it says "detecting IDE drives". I built this sytem myself, its the second only ive done. To be honest, i don't know much about it apart from buying compatible parts and putting them together lol.

Would a photo of the screen I am seeing help any?

EDIT:

here is a photo

post-147642-0-39189100-1355328159.jpg

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Guth

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It might be looking for something to boot off. You might have messed up the MBR on it, so it doesn't boot.

There is a good chance of that, using EaseUS partition manager I saw there was reserved partitions, I extended C: over all the free space I could.

It was working fine until right after editing the partitions, ever since then, this has happened.

okay so is there a way I can fix it?

If I put in a livecd, my pc wont boot with this drive plugged in as it just causes the hang, I can boot to live CD without it but ofcourse that is no use :laugh:

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Guth

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If you can run in AHCI mode, your SATA drives would be hot swappable. You can therefore plug it in after POST gets done.

this is from the ASRock site for my mobo


4 x SATA2 3.0 Gb/s connectors (No support for RAID and "Hot Plug" functions)
[/CODE]

Guessing that means I cannot do that :(

anything else I could do?

EDIT:

I enabled SMART and it now says Capable and Status OK.

However, it still hangs.

How long should I leave it? Ive only ever left it for 5/10 mins max.

Shouldn't it display an error or tell me to insert correct boot media?

Grand Master

+LogicalApex MVC

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this is from the ASRock site for my mobo


4 x SATA2 3.0 Gb/s connectors (No support for RAID and "Hot Plug" functions)
[/CODE]

Guessing that means I cannot do that :(

anything else I could do?

Interesting as Hot Swap is apart of the SATA specification.

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Guth

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Interesting as Hot Swap is apart of the SATA specification.

its an old computer, I'd love to just get a new one but unfortunately there is no way I can afford that at the moment. It does the job nicely for me and was faster than my laptop.

Wish I'd just left it be now :(

I really dont know what else to do, unplug the drive and the hang goes away so im guessing something broke the HDD.

however SMART does say its ok.

Get a sata to usb adapter.

didn't know there was such a thing. I guess I could try that

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Guth

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Is there any way you can reset the BIOS to default. Might be worth a shot. Make sure the boot order is correct, i.e. set to boot from the right Hard Drive. Tried different cables, ports, etc.

Reset CMOS

I reset BIOS and CMOS to no avail. Have checked boot order although this started when nothing was changed and it worked before. However even with just this HDD as the only thing plugged in its still the same.

Tried all 4 ports however I don't have another cable to test with.

Rising Star

mduren2445

Posted
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you need to fix your mbr your system is saying 'i've got a hard drive here but how do I use it?' thats why it is hanging. You may have to hang this drive off another computer as a second drive if you have access to one or like suggested get a sata to usb connector to repair this....check this site out

http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager/rebuild-mbr.htm

Grand Master

Nogib

Posted
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Besides resetting BIOS, have you tried updating to the latest BIOS (you are 4 revisions behind lol)? Nothing in the official list of fixes but I personally always run the very latest BIOS builds for my systems as there are often unlisted changes. Lord knows it can't hurt your current situation.

http://www.asrock.co...ownload&os=BIOS

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Guth

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you need to fix your mbr your system is saying 'i've got a hard drive here but how do I use it?' thats why it is hanging. You may have to hang this drive off another computer as a second drive if you have access to one or like suggested get a sata to usb connector to repair this....check this site out

http://www.partition...rebuild-mbr.htm

Thanks for that, checking it out now :)

Besides resetting BIOS, have you tried updating to the latest BIOS (you are 4 revisions behind lol)? Nothing in the official list of fixes but I personally always run the very latest BIOS builds for my systems as there are often unlisted changes. Lord knows it can't hurt your current situation.

http://www.asrock.co...ownload&os=BIOS

to be honest, I've never updated a BIOS in my life! I've never even really heard of it or knew you could!

I'll definitely give it a go :)

Although I suspect I have borked the mbr as others have said, its the most likely explanation.

Thanks for this though! Will update once I get my HDD fixed as I have nothing else to boot into at the moment that I can do this from.

I don't feel quite so bad about not knowing since the site does say dont update the BIOS on a system that is working fine

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Guth

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Starting to get somewhere now.

I found a windows 7 disk in my dads box for his laptop, however as you know when I try to boot from anything, I can with the HDD plugged in. So what I did was boot from CD, the second it got past POST, i plugged in my HDD.

And it worked! :) It booted into windows recovery and detected errors.

However, the auto fix wont fix them and when I went to details it says the action is "Partition table repair" however that fails.

I tried the bootsect repair but that gave the error "couldn't find system partition" although I do see the system reserved partition in cmd prompt.

That was because I used the command "bootsect /nt60 SYS". Using bootsect /nt60 all does do something.

However no fix yet

Scrap all that, going for a clean install. Screw it, could be here all night and day.

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