Computer Freezes, Hard Drive Not Recognized

I forgot to mention I also ran the Seagate drive diagnostics (full scan) - came up clean.

dito. its not the hdd. is your computer a dell? mine still does it.i have no idea

...your hard drive or IDE controller is failing and needs to be replaced. I would start with the replacing the hard drive, since that will be the easiest part to replace. You can install the new hard drive and test out the OS to see if it still locks up. If it does, then it's possible that the IDE controller is failing and you'll need to replace the system board (presuming it's an on-board controller like other system boards). A less likely, but still possible, cause is that the memory is faulty, which is easy enough to fix, but the odds that this is the problem is highly unlikely.

Good luck!

Timothy

This has been a problem for me, until I discovered that a magnetic field was affecting my hard drive.

Solution: 1)Remove all speakers, phones and DSL modems from closeness to the motherboard; 2) Demagnatize the hard drive by disconnecting the cable at both ends that go to the drive and to the motherboard for approximately 15 seconds: 3) Reconnect, plug in power and reboot.

This will happen several more times as long as that field is somewhere inside of your PC circuits. However, a repeat of the above procedure always rescued me.

My friend had a similar problem. The problem is your hard drive. When your HDD is working, backup all your files, and then reinstall OS on a new HDD. They're really cheap now a days. Almost always on sale. About $40-60 for 160GB

Hi,
I happend to have enjoyed and extremely similar issue with my Dell Latitude 600 laptop, running XP Pro+SP2.

At boot time I could capture a "IO Read error: cannot read/find ArcBoot signature" (or something pretty close to this) before the message is wiped away and it ends up saying there is no bootable disk. Problem was repeating and insisting on trying to boot wouldn't help (in which this seems to differ from your description).

It turned out that after bringing the laptopto a friend's place where XP StartupCDs were available (I thought I'd to reinitialise the system completely), the boot suddenly worked. Back home it failed again. I suspected a false contact between the disk controller connector and the (removable) C: drive. So, I kind of gently shook the (powered-off) laptop a couple of times in several directions, after which the system booted again...

Even though I initially thought it might have been a disk surface problem with the boot area, it would seem it was something completely different. I hope something as easy as this is happening to your own laptop...

Success!

Arnie

Thanks for all of your input. This drive is still under warranty. It is a 200 GB SATA Seagate drive.

I am first going to open the case up and reseat everything. I am also going to swap the SATA cables to eliminate a cable issue. I am going to attempt to run the drive diagnostics again. After that, I'll see what happens. I suppose then I will have to install my OS in my other drive. I'll see if the problem goes with the drive or not. I guess that will then tell me if my MB is FUBAR. I have a replacement board picked out at Newegg for under $50.

Can anyone see any issues w/ my plan?

Thanks again,
Jason

I had a similiar problem with a fairly new tower. What I found out was a faulty power plug that was giving intermitten voltage to the hard drive. You might try and change to another power plug and see if that works.
Let me know how it works out.


radiotech950@sbcglobal.net

There can be multiple causes that leads to problem such as this.
I had similar problem on my laptop (an IBM Thnkpad)before.

Just FYI.

This was what I did:

I took out the seemd problematic hard drive and replace it with a new hard drive and tried to install Winodws XP on it. It wouldn't install .Then I knew the problem was probablly with the Motherboard.

I took it to IBM service to have them check it out
for me. The service engineer told me that the problem can bee either with chipset(Hardware) on the board or the that drived the chipset. In my case,lucky enough, it turned out that the firmware was out of date and wouldn't work with the level of Windows on the hard drive.

He downloaded the latest firmware from IBM site installed it and the hard drive booted properly.
And I wasn't charged for that.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.God bless.
May the force be with you )


Jacob

i have the newest bios and I installed a new hdd and loaded xp. not because of the startup just wanted a bigger hdd thought it would fix that problem but it still won?t see my drive if the computer is on i can restart all i want but if its off for a while i have to reboot 3 or 4 times