[Whitelight]

OT:  My daughter`s pc was operating fine last night, but when she tried to start it today it gave her this message: operating system not found.. it would not reconize the C drive, I tried everything I could think of to rectify the problem, but was left with a trashed drive in the end...

So I decided to take my extra drive from my pc and install it in hers, bad move cause now i`m stuck with 2 trashed drives.. This thing has an appetite for harddrives.

I have been in computers for about 10 years now and have never had this problem before today, anyway it looks like she is going to get her wish for a new pc as i`m done with it... Boy did her eye`s light up at the sound of that...

[vadar_1]

"eyes light up"? id be pissed off if I lost a drive... like whats happened... uh, 4 times now in the past. Useless silicon trash. Was it hooked into the motherboard or a RAID controller? Try the drive on a different computer

[Stealth]

never had this happen... weird

ummmmm, by 'trashed' do you mean they won't be recognized or what?  can't they be formatted and the OS reinstalled?  regardless i have no clue!  perhaps the power supply could be screwing the hard drives, that's a possibility, or the Motherboard could just be ****ed... but if it's the motherboard, then after you plugged it in, and said it was trashed... can you plug the Hard Drive into another computer and does it not recognize the OS on that comp either?

[Warlock]

Another option is in the BIOS try and IDE detect. I had this happen once but I don't recall what I did, it was a few years back.

[Gortef]

try the "crashed" HD's on another PC and if they work then you could try Warlocks method OR if that doesn't help clear the CMOS and try again

(Note! If you don't know, clearing CMOS sets the BIOS into Default settings so you have to set up stuff like processor speed etc. again)

if the HD's won't work on another PC's then they might be really trashed

[Whitelight]

I can get fdisk to partition both the drives but when I tried to format the pc gave me the invalid drive message.. But before I did that I put the second bad drive in my pc and I stated the system files could not be found and stayed in limbo,  meaning it could reconise the drive but couldn`t read it... My pc has a harddrive controller card and my daughters uses bios to define the drive specs.. A friend of mine told me that it could be that one of the heads failed on the drives, if so then I think i`m dealing with a voltage problem...

Well talked it over with the wife and daughter and it`s a unanamus decision to just buy another pc and scrap the old one..

Did I mention that it has a 333mhz cyrix prossesor (yuk) never did care for that but at the time my daughter just wanted a pc and the fact that it was on sale and we were short on cash..

(Edit) Got to thinking well maybe the jumper settings have something to do with my problem, in checking I found that the drive was set for master which is what seemed right but it didn`t work... I  have set it to cable select and guess what,  yep the pc now accepted the harddrive.. But this has a downside to it, for now, because that means no new pc, dratts... Oh well learned a lesson anyway... The next time check the jumper settings before hand