[RESOLVED] Help trouble shoot some bull****....

Ok, so. My PC, motherboard died. I've come to terms with that, that's all assured, but here's the problem. I'm attempting to check my hard drive, to make sure it's contents are still intact. To do so, I'm checking it in my brother's old PC (a Dell 8250). I'm having a few issues, however. Here's what is occuring:

It starts up with Dell screen, under the loading bar it has :BIOS Revision A01".

After that, it goes to a "Can not find Hard Disk 1, press F1 to continue, F2 for Setup" screen.
If you press F1 to continue, it will proceed to the "Start in safe mode or normal configs" screen. Choosing any of these will proceed back to the ""Can not find Hard Disk 1" screen.

Please, please please tell me it isn't dead. If it is of any help, there were previously two hard drives in the computer last time it was shut down. Also noteworthy, I removed the pin from the hard drive, so it is automatically set to master. I'm using the end of IDE 1 cable.

If any more info's needed, I'd be glad to provide. It's WinXP SP 2, but its not getting that far yet so I doubt it's of any help.

Why not use your brothers as the master and yours as a slave?

We just thought of that. But if it won't boot mine, is it a sign that it might not access at all?

Or some parts of it has been corrupted. I don't think you can just take one drive and put it in another computer and hope it will work. Not sure about this stuff, but think the windows is set up for your mobo. It might also be that the BIOS knows where to look on the drive to boot windows. This is all guessing though.

You need to set the jumper on your drive to Slave before you put it in your brother's machine...

That's a good suggestion, EVP. It might need to be set on 'cable select', though. I was swapping some hard drives out not too long ago and some of them have different jumper requirements, so check your documentation or the manufacturer's site for which one it needs to be.

That's a super classy new avatar you got there, EVP!:thumbsup:

Thank you...

I would put the drive on the secondary ide port by itself, set the jumper to master, then boot your friends pc, go in to windows explorer and check the drive.

Be careful with the assumption that all drives work together. I have a 400mhz Pentium machine (hard drive is single partition installation) that will not accept a secondary hard drive (hard drive is 3 partitions) for either cable select or a master / secondary setup. If I pop it back into the machine I took it from it starts right up.

The kicker... the machine I was testing with had a secondary drive until I removed it to put the other drive in (and it wasn't a configuration issue, either. The IDE ports are set to automatically detect.). It was the damndest thing I think I've ever seen.

Also, it probably sounds stupid, but make sure you're getting power to it. :D Can you hear the HD spin up or power on when you start the machine from a cold boot?

I'm capable enough to know the jumper settings and all, but thankyou. It just seemed to be some odd fluke, maybe the guess about mobo configuration was correct, because setting it to slave and using with my brother's ran fine, and all the data is there. Thanks for all the help guys.

And for EVP, the lights on the mobo werent even on, while I could heard the HD turning and what not. So fairly sure the mobo is blasted.

Glad to hear.....mobos are replaceable, data.....not so much.