Hard Drive Failure... or is it?

[karateka]

Just put together a new system, with a 13GB IBM IDE drive.

Oddest thing has happened - twice! I'm loading a game (South Park, via Game Spy for internet play) and the system totally hangs. OK, no big deal... but on reboot the hard drive is not recognized by the system and I'm asked to put media in drive A:

Now... I was pretty crushed when this happened, thinking my HD was gone. Oddly enough, leaving it alone for 5 mintues seemed to "fix" the problem. Its happened once again, again on the SP load. So, anyone have any advice? Prayers? Good jokes? Let me know!

[beck]

Open the box back up and reseat the simms/dimms, cards, cpu and cable connectors. Check to be sure that you aren't over clocked. Set your cmos for defaults. Check your fan and cooling system for the cpu. Try running with the case off/open to see if that helps.

Try to get the system stable first, so that you don't have problems running it, then try changing to get better performance.

[psyklone]

Are you loading any type of drive overlay with that? If so, it sounds like it may not be a bad idea to run the partitioning program that it came with and then reformat. It sounds like your FAT has is sitting on a pretty unstable media which is why I ask about the overlay.

[Pantion]

Hmm... pretty odd check the BIOS settings to make sure the AUTO option is enabled for HDD detection or put manual settings if you want to be sure they are okay or to save some seconds at boot time.

Also check the Device Manager on Win9x to make sure everything is at it should. Just as a precaution http://www.sysopt.com/forum/wink.gif

[GVolosky]

It is advisable to "burn-in" a new system prior to loading any programs to insure the Hardware is functioning properly....Putting NEW programs on a NEW harddrive in a NEW computer creates too many variables to troubleshoot without being able to eliminate SOMETHING...