Member Avatar for mps727

Hi,

I've been trying to get an old system running for a little bit now and after a lot of testing I've found that when the hard drive is not plugged in, it will POST fine but if it is, it freezes during the Detecting IDE part. I have tried to different IDE ribbon cables and the same thing happens both times. I suspect that the drive is bad but I don't have a second drive to test with. Is there any way to know whether a drive is dead? It's not VERY old and was actually in pretty good condition, so I don't want to throw it out without being 100% sure.

Edit: Something else I noticed. Removing the jumper has teh same effect as unplugging the IDE cable. Not sure if this information means anything but thoght I would throw it in there.

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Dani AI

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The POST behaviour you describe — POST completes with the drive disconnected but the machine hangs at "Detecting IDE" when the drive is attached, and removing the jumper makes the drive effectively disappear — most commonly points to a hardware-level fault (drive electronics, stuck heads/motor or a power/IDE-bus problem) rather than a simple filesystem error. Repeated power-cycling or long unattended attempts can make a failing drive worse, so avoid prolonged retries if the data is important.

Quick, non-destructive checks to try before buying or tossing anything:

  • Verify the Molex power plug: swap to a different connector on the PSU and confirm the drive spins and the front-panel LED lights.
  • Listen for clicking, grinding, or no spin: clicking or no spin usually means physical failure.
  • Disconnect everything else (optical drives, removable devices) and connect the HDD as the only device on the cable, with its jumper set to single/master and on the primary IDE port.
  • Reset CMOS (clear BIOS) and try again; also try the other IDE channel on the motherboard.
  • If the BIOS allows, temporarily disable IDE auto-detection or set the channel to "None" to confirm the hang is during detection.

If the drive can be attached to another working computer (a cheap USB↔IDE adapter or external enclosure works), run vendor diagnostics or SMART tests rather than relying only on filesystem tools. Useful resources: smartmontools and bootable toolkits such as Ultimate Boot CD. Example smartctl commands you can run from Linux:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sdX
sudo smartctl -t long /dev/sdX

If you need a low-cost way to keep the old box usable for learning Linux, consider a USB flash drive or a CompactFlash+IDE adapter (CF cards appear as IDE disks) rather than stressing the suspect drive; see CompactFlash for the interface details. As suggested, testing the drive in another system is ideal — if that is not possible, a USB-IDE adapter lets you run the diagnostics above without risking the original machine. If diagnostic tools show many reallocations/read errors or the drive clicks/doesn’t spin, retire the drive (or consult professional recovery for critical data).

Member Avatar for avhunt

Old System? Like Win98? If the filesystem on the HDD is FAT32, try getting hold of an older (DOS 7) boot floppy. Change the HDD jumpers to slave, boot up on the floppy and try running the old scandisk utility to test it. On the other hand, have you got a friend who will let you attach the HDD to his/her machine and use the XP management console to repair it. then try it as a boot drive again on yours. You've probably thought of all this already. Hope this helps. Andrew

Member Avatar for mps727

It's a windows XP machine. It's probably about 5 years old. It wasn't being used and I wanted to revive it and install Ubuntu on it.

Member Avatar for avhunt

I think I'd want to try the drive as a slave in another machine and use the managment console to diagnose rather than persevering with the old box.

Member Avatar for mps727

Hmm... ok. I don't really have another machine to try it in, except the one I'm using now, but the data on here right now is too important to me for me to feel comfortable tinkering in it. I guess I'll see if I can't buy another cheap drive, like a 100GB drive or something, since really all I want is something that I can use to learn Linux.

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