[Ancient System] Pretty sure I screwed over my hard drives?

[Justiceinacan]

So I have a main gaming PC and then I have a quiet place PC upstairs. It's twelve years old rocking a Pentium 4 HT 3 GHz, 1024 MB DDR-400, and what looks like an ATI Radeon 9200 (AGP card, of course) and had windows XP 32 bit. It was my "Homework and whatever game can run and sometimes Skype machine"

Recently, the 160GB Maxtor HDD started flashing errors, system flashed with "Reboot or select proper boot device and press a key" kind of screen.

I paid a visit to my grandfather's majestic PC stash with nothing made after 2004, found an identical PC with a 160GB Maxtor HDD and an 80GB Seagate. I also noted on the way back you tend to feel all the damned frost heaves and bumps in the road when you're carrying sensitive cargo.

When a drive is installed and system is powered on, at the BIOS flash, there is a beep, and it says "DRIVE ERROR (A"

Going into BIOS setup shows that when a drive is installed, that drive is reported as installed.

When attempting to load any operating system, the PC goes to "Reboot or select proper boot device" screen.


Is it safe to assume my drive is dead? What possible fixes / tests could I conduct?

Onto part two (assuming drives are both dead)
Here's what my motherboard looks like. I believe it's called something like ASUS P4SD-LA
https://www.pcbitz.com/content/images/products/17114/thumbnail/hp-asus-p4sd-la-rev-106-socket-478-motherboard-no-bp-2.jpg
http://ruthusher.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/Glider/temp/motherboard-p4sd-la-i5.JPG
At the bottom right near the blue IDE port, there are two what look to be SATA ports. I DO have an intact 250 GB 7200 RPM HDD that is as nearly as old as SATA is, is it possible to use?
Power connectors aren't a problem. I got plenty of PSU's and adapters.

 

[Justiceinacan]

bump

 

[BFG-9000]

That just means it's unable to find anything bootable. This could be because there is no active partition on the drive or it's not set to boot, or the boot order is set to boot from floppy first and the floppy drive is dead or not properly plugged in (as in no power or cable upside down). Best to change the floppy type to disabled or none until you need it to flash some firmware or install some F6 driver.

Go into the BIOS to change the boot order to boot from optical or USB before the HDD, then boot from your OS installation media.

Those are indeed SATA-150 ports on a 865G/ICH5 chipset, which will accept even a new SATA HDD or SSD up to 2TB, but you will need to configure the SATA in the BIOS. Note that even though ICH5 does not support AHCI it does support TRIM.

 

[Chicano]

Yes you can use the SATA HDD no problem... but the message saying "Reboot or select proper boot device and press a key" may be just a lose IDE connection, a boot file error, a partition table error, a bios corruption, weak BIOS battery... and it may boot normally next time. If the HDD was working normally last time it's certainly not dead. They give warnings and symptoms before long before they fail.

The "DRIVE ERROR" message may only be some bad sector on the HDDs that can be repaired with a "CHKDSK X: /R" (where X is the drive letter) in a command prompt window. If the HDD wasn't used for a long time that can also be a cause for it causing a BIOS read error. You may have to run it connected to a PSU for a few minutes before trying to access it.

 

[Justiceinacan]

YIKES! I decided to plug in an older superflower leadex and try the SATA port, big spark happened on the SATA HDD almost right away and no boot screen.
The MAXTOR HDD is lifeless still, but the Seagate one is making some noise (before I tried the Leadex I should add, haven't tried a boot since) and the seagate one usually registers in BIOS. (2 of 3 attempts, it registered)

I pressed really hard on all connections and took out the floppy/CD drive connectors too.

It's entirely likely that these systems they were taken from were discarded for a reason (judging from CPU, RAM, and video cards, looks like he got one almost every year between 1996 and 2004)

It's notable that the Seagate drive causes the BIOS splash to take a lot longer than the SATA or maxtor drive did.
I have linux mint xfce 32 bit on a USB drive - should I attempt to load it?

I know nothing about BIOS, I take it command prompt is something in the OS itself, or is that something doable from BIOS?

 

[Chicano]

You tried the 250GB SATA HDD connected to the Superflow Leadex PSU(?) and it sparked from the SATA Power connection?.. if that's what happened, Don't try it again. The HDD must be damaged.

The Seagate HDD is just taking longer to recognise by the BIOS for reason like; bad disk sectors or partition table error.. if it's not giving any other error it shouldn't cause any damage to mobo components.. you could disable the S.M.A.R.T. setting in the BIOS so the BIOS doesn't waste time recognising it and the HDD should load normally... it will probably not boot but you may be able to access it from the Linux OS.

I don't understand what you mean in the last line... If the Seagate is a few or more GB in size it should have a Windows OS.. but the size alone should tell you it's not worth even testing. The command prompt OS or MS DOS was used when HDDs were sized in the hundreds of megabytes so it shouldn't even be worth accessing it. Make sure it's at least 20-40GB

 

[Justiceinacan]

Seagate is an 80GB drive

The 250GB sparked from the green circuit board looking-thing.

Another note, timing couldn't be better, my friend offered an old Q6600, 4 GB RAM, and a power supply sufficient to pop my older GTX 460 into. So I guess kinda consider my problem resolved.

 

[Chicano]

That's the HDD's PCB Printed or Logical Circuit Board... if you have a similar HDD interchanging the board may make it usable just don't connect it directly to a motherboard, first connect directly to a PSU and run it for a while till you're convinced it will not spark meaning the damage was the board, not HDD internal damage.

Yep, hope those components do the trick.