Trying to repair a comp...

[Digital Storm]

Hello all...first post...so I'm gonna get straight to the point...I have a computer AMD K5, trying to repair for my aunt...it's got a 3 gig drive, 32 megs of ram, cd rom, 2mb vid card, and floppy, pretty basic...here's the problem...I boot up...and the screen displays 'Primary Hard Drive Failure' 'Secondary Hard drive Failure'...so I checked the cables...tried again...this time in the setup...it detects the hard drive and everything...but FDisk fails to find the drive...Help!...jus in case the bios/motherboard is a an Award system...any help or insight would be greatly appreciated...thanxs in advance...

[BigGeek02]

I don't know what to tell you. Have you done drive diagnostics to make sure your hard drives work? Of course, if they booted up, they're probably fine. Um, can you access the drives from DOS? (maybe you could boot off of a DOS diskette or something) If so, you might try formatting the drives. I've heard rumors of FDISK not recognizing some partition types so maybe if you make it an FAT32 or an FAT16 you can eliminate that issue. Sorry, I don't know of any other options. Hope I helped some.

------------------
Computer Error Haiku-
"Warning: Universe Corrupt. Reboot?(Y/N)"

[Reid]

If the BIOS is set to autodetect the hard drives and there is only one hard drive, and the boot indicated Primary and Secondary drive failure, then I suspect the IDE ribbon cable and would try a new one. (My intuition is out of whack this week, so not quarantees) http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

------------------
reido@my-deja.com

Not quite right since 1948

[Paleo Pete]

I'd suspect the ribbon cable too, or possibly the controller. Replace the cable and see if at makes a difference.

If you can, try the drive in another computer, boot to a start up disk and see if fdisk sees it. If the same thing happens on another machine, the drive is probably dead. If you can try another drive on this machine, it would help prove it's not the controller.

Only problem with all that is most home users don't have the spare parts lying around to effectively troubleshoot problems of this nature. And friends don't usually want you tearing into their machines to test suspicious parts...So, you can take the drive to a computer shop and get them to test it, unless the cable fixes it.

------------------
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[Digital Storm]

Hello all...actually...it was the hard drive...now I jus gotta find a 3.0 gig drive to replace that one...but a 3 gig up here is 90$...so for 30$ I could pick up a 13.6 gig...Thanxs all...I can see this message board might get alot of use...

[Paleo Pete]

Check CSO (http://www.computersurplusoutlet.com) and Pricewatch (http://www.pricewatch.com) for prices, shipping might eat your lunch, but it might be worth looking into, and both usually have smaller drives listed.

You also might run across a BIOS drive size limitation of 8GB in that machine.

------------------
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[This message has been edited by Paleo Pete (edited 01-28-2001).]