Disk Boot Failure--- Testing?

[thedonquixotic]

I recently recovered my desktop from a basement that was hit by Irene. There appeared to be no water damage but it was still having trouble starting up.

It appeared to be a problem with the CPU overheating, so I got rid of my old janky fan and bought a new CPU fan.

I've now gotten it up and running but it's running into a Disk Boot Failure.

I reseated the hard drive cables, and gone into the bios and returned it to default settings.

Still no dice. I was wondering:

Is there someway for me to test this? Is there a way to connect it externally to my laptop and maybe see for sure if it is damage or maybe if I am just doing a poor job of connecting the cables?

GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3L Mobo

Old 200 gig harddrive. Seagate

 

[tsnor]

re: "...Is there a way to connect it externally to my laptop..."

Hi, it's pretty easy to connect a hard drive externally to a laptop. Is the hard drive a SATA hard drive (small data cable) or an IDE hard drive (big wide ribbon). Either way you can get an external USB enclosure where you plug the hard drive into the enclosure and then attach the enclosure via USB to the laptop.

Most desktop drives are 3.5" so make sure you get a 3.5" enclosure not a 2.5" laptop drive enclosure.

ex: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007705%2050001641%20600006254&IsNodeId=1&name=BYTECC%20INC&Order=PRICE see some are IDE and some are SATA.

Aside: if you have a clean copy of your operating system, etc, (recovery disks) a new sata hard drive like the 1TB spinpoint f3 is $50-60. Unless you need the data on the old disk it might be better to just assume it's bad. Unless you want the enclosure for future use anyway.

edit: you can also make a bootable CD that with disk diagnostics and try to see if the disk is good in your current pc. you can also go into the bios and see if the hard drive is detected by the bios. You should also listen to the disk at power up and see if it starts to spin when it gets power. If it doesn't spin then that's a real bad sign. google 'stiction' fixes and try some of them.

 

[thedonquixotic]

Best answer selected by thedonquixotic.

 

[thedonquixotic]

re: "...Is there a way to connect it externally to my laptop..."

Hi, it's pretty easy to connect a hard drive externally to a laptop. Is the hard drive a SATA hard drive (small data cable) or an IDE hard drive (big wide ribbon). Either way you can get an external USB enclosure where you plug the hard drive into the enclosure and then attach the enclosure via USB to the laptop.

Most desktop drives are 3.5" so make sure you get a 3.5" enclosure not a 2.5" laptop drive enclosure.

ex: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007705%2050001641%20600006254&IsNodeId=1&name=BYTECC%20INC&Order=PRICE see some are IDE and some are SATA.

Aside: if you have a clean copy of your operating system, etc, (recovery disks) a new sata hard drive like the 1TB spinpoint f3 is $50-60. Unless you need the data on the old disk it might be better to just assume it's bad. Unless you want the enclosure for future use anyway.

edit: you can also make a bootable CD that with disk diagnostics and try to see if the disk is good in your current pc. you can also go into the bios and see if the hard drive is detected by the bios. You should also listen to the disk at power up and see if it starts to spin when it gets power. If it doesn't spin then that's a real bad sign. google 'stiction' fixes and try some of them.

Thanks. I think buying a new one will be my best bet. I was doing some research, and I noticed that the enclosures were basically the same price as just getting a new one, and I have all my data backed up elsewhere.

Where would I look to see it detected in the bios?

 

[tsnor]

"Where would I look to see it detected in the bios?"

There's a list of the sata devices found. Here is a screenshot from one bios, YMMV. http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/48-12.jpg

 

[thedonquixotic]

Thanks man!