My friend has two WD 80gig ATA100 drives that hes had in his system for about two years. Recently one of the drives starting clicking and corrupting his OS so he ran the WD diagnostic tools from a bootable CD and the drive failed. He ordered a new motherboard, CPU, vid card and RAM as an upgrage to his old system and he wants to use the second 80gig drive (which passed the WD diagnostic) as his system drive and a new 160gig he ordered for storage.
Now on the second drive, he has a bunch of school work he wants to save off it, so we put it in one of my systems as a secondary to boot into windows and save his files. While we were transferring the files, the computer went crazy, there was graphics corruption on the screen, there was a very high pitched squeal coming from the computer which sounded like the psu, and it became very unstable to the point where it rebooted itself. Once it rebooted, the text in the bios was corrupted with random numbers and symbols mixed in with all the normal text. The computer wasnt detecting any IDE devices at all in the bios and naturally could not boot from any drive. Pressing the power button on the case would make the screen go black, but the system would stay on. Pressing it again would result in the same bios screen appearing again.
I hit the power switch on the back of the psu and disconnected both his and my hard drives from the system. I booted it up to find that the bios had reset itself to its defaults and that the graphical corruption was gone. I booted to a CD with memtest and tested the ram which found no problems. I then connected my hard drive to it and booted up and it went straight into windows as if nothing happened.
What could have caused that pretty bad crash? I have never encountered a problem with that computer we were using to save his files before. All it has in it is a Athlon XP-M barton core running at 2.3ghz with a geforce 5200 vid card, an epox mobo, 1gb of kingston valueram, one hard drive, one cd-rom drive all powered by a 420w thermaltake psu. The computer was put together for my mom to mostly check her email and bank accounts, never any gaming or high stress applications. Also all the parts are name brand so no cheap generic stuff.
My friend thinks its his second hard drive too that is crapping out on him, and thats whats causing all the problems. Although, I suspect it is a power issue with this computer that we used to transfer his files that caused the crash, which would explain the high pitched squeal, and the return to normal after unplugging the both drives. Also his hard drive passed the WD diagnostic tests no problem. Thankfully no data was corrupted on either drive even though the computer crashed mid transfer.
Any input would be greatly appreciated, and sorry for the long post but I tried to descrpbe it best I could.
Now on the second drive, he has a bunch of school work he wants to save off it, so we put it in one of my systems as a secondary to boot into windows and save his files. While we were transferring the files, the computer went crazy, there was graphics corruption on the screen, there was a very high pitched squeal coming from the computer which sounded like the psu, and it became very unstable to the point where it rebooted itself. Once it rebooted, the text in the bios was corrupted with random numbers and symbols mixed in with all the normal text. The computer wasnt detecting any IDE devices at all in the bios and naturally could not boot from any drive. Pressing the power button on the case would make the screen go black, but the system would stay on. Pressing it again would result in the same bios screen appearing again.
I hit the power switch on the back of the psu and disconnected both his and my hard drives from the system. I booted it up to find that the bios had reset itself to its defaults and that the graphical corruption was gone. I booted to a CD with memtest and tested the ram which found no problems. I then connected my hard drive to it and booted up and it went straight into windows as if nothing happened.
What could have caused that pretty bad crash? I have never encountered a problem with that computer we were using to save his files before. All it has in it is a Athlon XP-M barton core running at 2.3ghz with a geforce 5200 vid card, an epox mobo, 1gb of kingston valueram, one hard drive, one cd-rom drive all powered by a 420w thermaltake psu. The computer was put together for my mom to mostly check her email and bank accounts, never any gaming or high stress applications. Also all the parts are name brand so no cheap generic stuff.
My friend thinks its his second hard drive too that is crapping out on him, and thats whats causing all the problems. Although, I suspect it is a power issue with this computer that we used to transfer his files that caused the crash, which would explain the high pitched squeal, and the return to normal after unplugging the both drives. Also his hard drive passed the WD diagnostic tests no problem. Thankfully no data was corrupted on either drive even though the computer crashed mid transfer.
Any input would be greatly appreciated, and sorry for the long post but I tried to descrpbe it best I could.