Look who's back for my harddrive help!

[ShinRa]

Yes yes I haven't died (yet). If you can recall, back in last April my very beloved raptor crapped out on me...gave me the blue screen of death 3 seconds into the desktop loading. I still have it laying next to me. I then bought a Seagate 160gb. Since I bout it 9 months ago, I must have reformatted 20 times. The hd makes a weird noise and when it does my comp stops functioning. Idk if its a harddrive problem or something else. Anyway, I've decided to restart my raptor revival program. I put the hd in with win/xp to see what I can get, but the comp says it doesn't detect any disks in the computer. I have reason to believe this is because its a SATA drive, and I recall when I installed the raptor for the first time, I needed a specific driver loaded on a floppy disk, then I had to hit f6 to install the 3rd party driver at the windows xp loading screen. My question is, does anyone know where I can get the driver that I put in and press f6 to install scsi or third party drivers as they say on the xp cd?

 

[ShinRa]

noone? drives so comp recognizes sata hd? anyone? lol

 

[ShinRa]

this hd is really starting to **** up now so id really appriciate it

 

[Shodan]

I googled the name of my HD, looked for drivers that way, thing is, it has to be the exact one, or you will get BSOD's all the time.

 

[ShinRa]

ok scratch that plan the drives dead. now i have 2 choices. fix this damn computer...or buy a new one and i REALLY want to avoid spending another $2000 on a new comp if this can be remedied. i have an amd fx-53, 1gb corsair xms pc3200, the pain in the ass seagate barracuda 160gb 7200 rpm, 560watt thermaltake psu, a audigy2 zs soundcard, an sapphire x800xtpe, and an asus a8v deluxe mobo.

the problem: the computer, the hd i believe, makes a sound, its a very faint...short...beep sound. it happens either when i right click, try to open a file, or when windows locks up or doesnt load at all. the only game i can play is starcraft. anything on steam, deus ex, fear, etc. all either crash my comp or the game closes and sends me back to my desktop. now i know theres a solution out there somewhere, and id really appriciate all the help i can get. these arent crap parts we're dealing with, so something must be wrong. ive reformatted at least 20 times in the last 9 months, but this problem persists. what could it be? please help...im not asking..im begging.

 

[psyno]

To your first question, you get them from the HDD manufacturer's website. For the Raptor, that's www.wdc.com and for the Barracuda, that's www.seagate.com.

Now, what makes you think it's the HDD in the first place? I've never known a HDD, even a malfunctioning one, to beep. I've known them to whine, click, scratch, etc., but never beep. What evidence do you have for HDD failure? Have you run tools that have reported file system corruption? Bad blocks?

What happens if you use Windows in safe mode?

 

[ShinRa]

Well...no your right it may not be the hd, but when I put in the other hd I get no beeps...instead windows just can't detect a harddrive. I'm starting to believe its my motherboard. Back in January of last year, for a few days my computer literally just didn't turn on at all. There was no power to the mobo. This is the a8v deluxe I'm talking about. Then randomly it came back on and everything worked fine. About 2 months after that is when the raptor started to make a click sound and eventually gave me the blue screen of death every time I got to the desktop. I got the seagate then. The seagate doesn't click but essentially does the same thing the raptor did, without the BSOD's. I hear a very very faint beeping sound, which I now suspect is my motherboard. My bios is completely updated as are all my drivers. Everytime I try to reformat now or use the windows xp cd, the comp never lets me. Just when its about to load the menu screen for the winxp cd, the little beep sound starts and my comp just freezes.

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

My old faulty motherboard destroyed a hard drive ... I'm convinced of it. And I'm very familiar with the odd sounds a HD can make and they're never a good thing.

Windows tends not to detect a HD that doesn't have a working partition.

From the sound of it, your motherboard might be the culprit. But you never know whether the HD is still good or not until then. Try putting it as an extra drive in another computer and see if you can get data off of it, or if it makes the same noise. If the other comp freezes, get it the f*ck out of there.

 

[ShinRa]

if it is the motherboard...which i'm starting to suspect myself....is there anything i can do to save it? id really like not having to replace my mobo.

 

[NJspeed]

Sell the PC on craigslist or Ebay and use the money (plus a little more) to buy a brand new one.

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

There's nothing you can do. Unless you're the motherboard's manufacturer
Still, replacing a motherboard is fine if you don't want to buy a whole new everything. Just test the hard drives on another machine to determine if they're still good, and if so, buy a new motherboard and all should be well. Just buy it from somewhere you're willing to return it to if it doesn't do the trick.

 

[ShinRa]

well i do want to buy a whole new everything now. i hate it that im confined to starcraft only, and even that froze today...things are just getting worse. i was thinking of an athlon 64 4000+ or 4200+ with an x1900 with pci-x, and keeping my ram and other peripherals. is this a worthy upgrade or should i go higher?

edit: turns out the 4000-4200 is actuall 200mhz slower than my fx-53 lol. as far as i can tell...the only worthy upgrade is the fx-57 which is 2.8ghz. isnt there anything cheaper than this but at the same time reasonably faster than my fx-53?

 

[ShinRa]

well thanks to the silence i went ahead and spent $2000 that i didnt really want to spend. oh well im set for a while now at least. i went with:

fx-57
x1900xt
asus a8n-nforce4 deluxe
maxtor diamondback 250gb 16mb cache
kept my case, drives, ram, and soundcard.

i should be alright for at least a few years now right?

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

Yeah, I'd say so! Hope all works out well. Be sure to tell us how the system runs!

 

[ShinRa]

:imu: this thing is a BEAST. holy shit it might as well be instantaneous. winxp doesnt even get past the 2nd loading bar before my desktop is ready for use. havent played any games on it yet, still installing all the crap. ill let ya know though. thanks for the help.