both drives bad?

:eek: The son of a friend inherited a new computer I put togeather, when his computer seemingly croaked. I took it with me when I delivered his new one.

It is one his father had originally, but son bought new MB abit kw7 with a sempron 3.2 cpu. It had 768 mb ram and 2 HDD w/0 any raid, a 60 gb quantom fireball and a 40 gb maxtor. He was running xp home.

He gave the following history. He was printing and the printing was lage and it started to slow down to a crawl, so he went out and bought 512 more ram to put in. After opening the case and placing the ram no boot. Changing the ram back did nothing.

What I've found seems wierd, therfore the post. Niether HDD will show in the bios as master no matter what I jumper it to be or where I place it on the cable. In replacing the ide cable I notice a tear in the old cable. My question. Could that tear in the cable have fried the 2 HDD's? That's my only explanation.

BTW A new HDD does fix the problem It can boot right up with linux.

Anything is possible likely.
Have you tried the drives separately in another system to see if they detect correctly in that system?

A bad data cable won't trash a drive, but it can keep them from being detected correctly in the BIOS. I've even seen bad electronics on a drive prevent a fully functional second drive from working or even freeze a system during boot up.

The "tear" you see in the cable may not be significant. Not all pins (and therefore not all wires) on the drive are used. Abit normally ships IDE cables with their mainboards that have a cut in them corresponding to the unused pin on the drive.

Static discharge can damage a drive, and a bent pin or two on the drive connector could be a problem as well. Finally, I'm willing to bet these are old drives (especially the Quantum Fireball) and it may be that old age has just caught up with them.

I guess it is possible that both Hdd's went bad at the same time. I cannot jumper either to be master. I havn't tried fdisk and I havn't tried either in another machine. I took a 160 WD that I had in a linux box and that was ided as master w/o a problem. I therfore I figure it's HDD dysfunction and not MB. These probably are ancient HDD's. But to go togeather seems wierd.:confused:

Until you try them in another machine, you won't know how to proceed. How do you know that both HDDs were working before?

:) your right Noo Noo! I talked to Dad who talked to son and one drive was bad already, so then the other just failed. The failure of both drives at the same time was an illusion.:thumbs2:
I still may throw a win98 disk in and try to fdisk them.

And if they don't, take them apart and have some fun with the magnets :D

NooNoo said "And if they don't, take them apart and have some fun with the magnets"

probably will play with them.:thumbs2: