hard drive issues???...need help

[Mospinach]

Howdy all

I have a WD800AB 5400 rpm 80 GB hard drive. a few months ago, I was opening the case and accidentally tore a few of the wires on the IDE cable connecting the hard drive to my motherboard (model A7NBX-LA I believe). I was stupid and tried to turn the machine on anyway to see if it would still work...bad idea I guess. I can't recall exactly what happened, but I turned the machine off and basically disassembled the whole thing and left it sitting around until 2 days ago. I don't know if this occurrence is relevant to my present situation, though a few more-computer-savy-than-me friends of mine told me it shouldn't.

Fast forward to the present. Yesterday I purchased a Xion II tower (came with a 450 pow. supply), new IDE cables for both the hard drive and my 2 ROM drives (single drive cable for the hd and dual drive cable for the ROM drives), and a new 128 mb graphics card. I put everything in place, hooked up everything to the motherboard, and so forth, turned the machine on, and unhappy times for me.

It's originally an HP computer, and when it first turns on, the first main thing that appears is a completely blue screen with the HP company logo in white....it only gets that far now and goes no further. It freezes at that point, I can't even get into BIOS or system recovery, even if I'm hitting the F1 or F10 buttons as it's booting up. I tried all kinds of things: I switched the IDE cables, putting the dual drive one on the hard drive alone as a test, trying to boot with the windows XP Home upgrade CD, switching the IDE cable slots on the mother board, and praying.

I already confirmed that it wasn't the graphics card, cuz I can take that out completely and still get the "blue screen of death", which also happened with any sort of IDE cable combination, so I doubt it's the new cables either. Does anybody have suggestions or outright beliefs of what the problem is and what to do? I don't want to just resign to it being the hard drive and having to buy a new one, especially if there's something I can do about it. Lemme know if I need to divulge more info or if y'all got questions. Thanks all.

 

[Elbatrop1]

Keep in mind that you can get into BIOS with very minimal hardware. Try disconnecting all of your IDE drives. If there is something really wrong with a drive, it might not let you get into BIOS.

I would start with that. Other things might be causing your bootup woes, but try that first.

 

[[SC]Hawk]

yeh soundslike there is an issue with your hardrive maby use a friends spare ardrive an se what happens

 

[Nitestick]

go with elbatrop's suggestion first. and if that fails, without the new video card again as well.

 

[Mospinach]

Ok....here's what I did. I disconnected all of my IDE cables, even took away the power from the hard drive. So my hard drive AND my ROM drives are not plugged into the motherboard at all. And of course the same thing happened, HP logo screen freezes. I took it to the MicroCenter near my house and some nerdy lookin' guy probably in his 50's told me he could run a diagnostic test....FOR 85 FRIGGIN' BUCKS...so I bounced outta there, but not before asking some questions. He said I should try to hit the Esc button while the thing is first turned on, cuz supposedly I could then see what the computer is actually doing rather than the HP logo screen. I guess that meant I could see the computer working as it tests for the monitor, keyboard, hd, etc. Of course, that didn't work at all, it still went to the HP logo screen. I guess all I got left to consider as an option now is the mobo. What do you all think of these recent revelations?

 

[Law]

Can you unplug and take everything out: harddrive, CD drive, floppy drive, sound card, NIC card any expansion card (except the video card of course) and try again and tell me the result please.

 

[EricB]

sound like your short someting in your mobo with you cut those wire. you aren't from columbus ohio are you? that sound like the guy from one of our microcenters ( I think that are only about 10 of them around)

 

[Sprooty]

have u tryed resetting the cmos?

take out the little battery for 5-10 minutes then put it back in(the computer must be unplugged from the power, not turned off at the back UNPLUGED!)