Beginner\'s Guide to Motherboard Selection

[maitre]

Crashman, Here's what happened:

I startet this entire spiel again, formatting, copying files over, preparing for Win XP to start and reboot. I took the CD out and set the BIOS to boot with the HDD. Result: disk read error, restart. Tried it 3 times, same result. The HD is about 4 weeks old, ran the Maxtor utility, no problems with the drive. For some reason, the hdd can not be read.

This is exactly the same message that I got about a month ago, when my old HDD crashed. I installed this new one and had not problems to install win XP pro. It ran for about a week and then the PC froze and could not be started again. That was when I posted the message about the ongoing beeping. Now that I have the Asrock board and the Athlon installed it seems that the HDD is crashed again. Is it possible that a bad CPU can damage a drive so it cannot be read anymore? Would a low-level format help? Thanks for all the help.

Ed

 

[Crashman]

If it can't read the drive, you probably have the drive controller set to the wrong mode. It needs to be in IDE mode, or Compatibility mode, rather than RAID or AHCI. Check your BIOS settings again!

 

[maitre]

No, the entire SATA mode is disabled.

 

[Crashman]

So you're using only IDE drives. And no RAID mode for IDE?

If you're using a Western Digital drive make note of the jumpers: WD uses a different setting for "Master with Slave attached" than they do for "Single".

 

[maitre]

Since the Sata controller is disabled, the RAID mode doesn't apply.

It's a brand-new Maxtor drive, 300GB.

Can a shot CPU screw up an HDD to make it unreadable? Would a low-level formatting help in any way?

 

[Crashman]

Some controller DO allow IDE drives to used in RAID mode. As for doing a low-level format, it's not likely to help.

There's one other thing to check, Hard Drive order in BIOS.

 

[maitre]

When I disable the SATA controller, the RAID setup disappears completely. As to the IDE boot order, there's ony one HDD connected and it shows correctly in the BIOS as boot device.