Help! BIOS and Hard Drives

[-CrackKing-]

Ok this one has got me stumped....

(First of all - BIOS detects all hard drives mentioned below as Primary Masters and they show up in BIOS and POST thingy)

About last month or so my PC shut down by itself, and when I restarted it it gave the error "non system disk" thingy, i.e no hard drive.

I left it off for a few hours and it started up fine and no problems until tonight.

Tonight, again it restarted, but this time it will not get to the Windows splash screen - it just hangs. Occasionally, if I restart it, it will give the error "The following file is missing or corrupt - Cwindows\system32\config\system" or it says that ntfs.sys is corrupt.

This was a PC I inherited from my sister that was riddled with spyware and wasn't used for about 6 months before I plugged it back in, cleaned it up, anti virused, anti spywared, and gave a fresh windows installation to.

So, given the above, I thought that maybe there was some residual crap left on it, and got an old hard drive out the cupboard and unplugged the current one.

The one from my cupboard has Windows XP preinstalled, I didn't think it would boot given all the hardware changes but just wanted to see if maybe I could get into safe mode, or at least to the splash screen. However this hard drive also hangs at exactly the same place as the one that was originally in the PC. Weird...

So I got an even older hard disk out of my cupboard that has Windows98 installed, lol. I plugged it in, and I get to the Win98 splash screen - but tapping ESC immediately shows it is also hanging at the same place as the other two!

The place where it hangs is the screen where it shows all the UDMA PCI Device listing shit, ie the next screen after it's detected the hard disks and just before it usually tries to start windows.

To make it worse - it will not boot from CD - it just hangs when you put the CD in. So I can't even do a repair/reinstall.

How can three hard drives be crashing at the same place? What can be wrong with my PC?

So far I have:
Reset all BIOS defaults
Unplugged all non essential things i.e CD drives, mice, everything USB etc
Tried both RAM chips on their own
Tried a different 4pin power thingy
Tried a different IDE cable

Any help much appreciated with much love and bottom snogs xxxxx

 

[Quasi^]

Have you tried taking out all pci cards - ie sound, network etc\?

What do you mean by 'BIOS detects all hard drives mentioned below as Primary Masters'? How many hard drives are there? Only one should be primary master ( the boot drive for windows).

 

[-CrackKing-]

Sorry. I meant that, of all the 3 drives I have tried, the BIOS does detect each one correctly when I have tried them one by one.

So the original drive shows up as WDC blah blah
The other as Samsung blah
etc

All appears fine, they just wont boot - all hang.

There are no PCI cards, sound and nic are onboard. Only card is an AGP Geforce 4.
I have disconnected sound and network cable so that the only things plugged in are Power, VGA and keyboard.

I burnt a new boot CD and I manage to get it to boot from CD-ROM now, but there is a file error in i386\something and Windows Setup crashes. I burnt another and the same thing happens.

The motherboard is too old to boot from USB else I'd have tried using BartPE or something.

I can't even get command prompt to chkdsk or, worst case, format....

 

[Thrasher (_!_)]

Reseat all cards and RAM.
Make sure all cooling fans are working....especially CPU. (Might be heat related, temperatures can often be seen in the BIOS somewhere)
If it still wont start, remove as much as possible i.e. remove power from 2nd hard drive & cdroms etc to see if its the power supply running out of juice. Ideally try another power supply.

 

[doh]

TBH it sounds like a malfunctioning southbridge.
If you've already tried all the hardware stuff mentioned, like reseating, and removing everything non-essential i only have a couple of ideas of what might help.

Load BIOS defaults.
Switch the harddrive to the 2nd IDE port.
Make the harddrive primary or secondary slave instead of master (eg change the drive location on the cable if you use cable select jumper setting).

 

[Quasi^]

It does sound like a hardware problem with mobo. I would try a few different cables out though in case thats the problem.

 

[-CrackKing-]

Thanks everyone for your help.

My friend came round tonight with a different mobo and some RAM, and it turned out both RAM chips were causing the problem. Using one of his has totally cured it

Very weird!

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