Hard Drive light stays on - system fails to boot.(Sometimes)

[tonemgub]

Hello,

I have previously written in this forum and recieved a lot of help so I thought I would try to see if the experts could figure out what might be going wrong. Sometimes but not always when I go to turn on my PC it seems to hang and the Hard Drive light stays on, it will not boot and I must reset the computer. Sometimes (again!) and again not always I have to reset it 2 or 3 times. When I say reset it I must press the On/Off button until it totally powers down. I am wondering if something is about to fail in my machine. The Master Hard Drive is relatively new (1 Year Old Hitachi Deskstar 80 GB) but since I bought it has always been quite loud, not deafiningly loud but louder than what I would expect from a new Hard Drive. It is still under guarantee so if it is failing I have the option to take it back. I wouldnt want to do this as it is the main drive for my operating system and all my data lies on it but as a last resort I will. The other thing that I was thinking that could be the problem is that the other hard drive is an older IBM 20 GB and it might be in some way affecting the other one booting or perhaps it is failing.Are there any tests I can run to see what perhaps might be causing the problem?

Many thanks,

Chris

[jimmalenko]

The most simple test you could do is disconnect the IDE and power from the 20GB drive, then try starting up.

[pfh]

The older IBM drives had a bad reputation for early life failures- could be it is one of those questionble drives.

[rkr1958]

We have a similar problem with my wife's 733-MHz PIII Gateway that we bought 5-years ago in the Summer of 2000. I'd say about 1-4 (or 3) boot-up after a shut-down or power-down hangs at the screen that lists the amout of RAM and before the Gatway Splash screen. The only thing we can do when this happens it to do a hard power-off, keep it off for 10-seconds or so and then re-power / re-boot. To this day I never been able to figure the cause of this problem. Maybe you're experiencing something similar ... Sorry I don't really have anything concrete for you to try ...

[Mr anderson]

have you tried the harddrive in another computer (of simlair spec) to see if its a problem with the pc and not the hdd? i tried something like that first, fault find first, so if you have an old computer take the hdd out and try it in that first, if that works and does hang on shut down or boot up you know that the hard drive is ok, and there could be a problem else where? also what verison of windows are you are you running? is it 98 se1?

[HatchetMan]

Your stats list a 160GB HDD, yet you mention an 80 and a 20. I personally have 3 Hitachi Deskstar's and they are extremely quiet. Could be the IBM, could be a bent, broken ide pin, bad ide cable, anything really.