Member Avatar for Paroxuno

I am running an AMD Duron 1300 mhz with Windows XP. This morning I got up and turned my computer on and it cannot find the hard drive now, the bios doesn't even register it.

Here's how it started:
I upgraded my memory from 1 256 meg PCI 133 to a 512 meg DDR. Upon booting up, everything worked fine through bios and then the sceen was simply blank (black), when it tried to load Windows XP. I reset the machine, and it said it registered a failed attempt to boot, and asked whether or not safe mode or normal. So I did safe mode, everything seemed to be working fine, so I restarted and it booted up just fine.

I then changed out my AGP video card, and it did the same thing, except this time I just told it to boot normally, no safe mode, and it started just fine. I loaded the drivers and everything without any problems.

So, now every time I boot up over the past 2 days it goes through bios and then gives me a black screen. I reset the computer and it registers a failed attempt to boot previously, and I tell it to start normally, and I leave it on all day without any problems.

This morning I booted up and jumped in the shower, forgetting about the need to reset, and it sat there on the blank screen for about 10 minutes, then I reset, but this time it couldn't find the hard drive and started scanning the CD roms and floppy drive for a master boot record. I had just run a scan with Norton the night before, and it auto-updates from the web, so it should be pretty accurate. The bios could not find the hard drive, so I popped a Windows 98 start up disk from my other computer in and sure enough, no hard drive.

Any ideas? I have no idea if changing out the memory and the start up problems are related, but I checked the cables and everything is still hooked up. I guess I can try disconnecting and re-connecting the cables, but I don't know what to try. I could put the hard drive in my other machine which is running 98, and see if the hard drive works. I also know Maxtor and Western Digital have tools that can be used to set up hard drives and such, anyone know any good diagonstic tools.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Killer_Typo
Member Avatar for Killer_Typo

a windows 98 harddisk wouldnt be able to find the drive if you were running a NTFS file system i believe. if you have a windows XP CD try placing that in the drive and booting from that and see if it cant detect the hard drive currently installed into the machine. also make sure the jumper settings are correct the HD itself. Also try removing the newly added things and see if it will boot normally again.

also the memory you put in, the new stuff did it fit into a different slot than the older memory IE it was a different style of memory, you might need to adjust jumpers on the motherboard if thats the case because on mine, there was about 20 pins i had to put into the off position so i could swap the style of memory.

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