Some weird hard drive and booting-up problem

[Shinova]

One of my computers (thank god not the one I use) has been acting weird lately. First, it's equipped with one of those external hard-drive things where you can switch in and out different hard drives depending on what you want to do at the moment.


So, there's two hard drives for it. One of them, the computer just doesn't recognize---the comp goes past BIOS and then sort of just sits there. The other hard drive, Windows starts to boot up then BOOM, abruptly reboots back to the very beginning.



Soooo..... any ideas?

[phongn]

Alright boys and girls, lets keep this on-topic

[Tech^salvager]

One of my computers (thank god not the one I use) has been acting weird lately. First, it's equipped with one of those external hard-drive things where you can switch in and out different hard drives depending on what you want to do at the moment.


So, there's two hard drives for it. One of them, the computer just doesn't recognize---the comp goes past BIOS and then sort of just sits there. The other hard drive, Windows starts to boot up then BOOM, abruptly reboots back to the very beginning.



Soooo..... any ideas?

What type of external drives? Did you reinstall drivers? Did you try booting into safe mode? Which windows version?

[Ace Pace]

What type of external drives? Did you reinstall drivers? Did you try booting into safe mode? Which windows version?

I'll say this quickly here as I typed it again in the other thread:

HE CANNOT reinstall drivers, he CANNOT boot into safe mode, since it either hangs in the BIOS, or crashs in the windows load up.

Since Phong split my question, i'll quote it:

Have you tried the drives on another PC? If they don't work there, they might have been corrupted, see a data recovery shop. If it does recoginize the drives, the problem might be the computer.

[Tech^salvager]

So, there's two hard drives for it. One of them, the computer just doesn't recognize---the comp goes past BIOS and then sort of just sits there. The other hard drive, Windows starts to boot up then BOOM, abruptly reboots back to the very beginning.

Windows starts to boot up<--- reboots to the beginning.

That tells me that Shinova has gotten past post and into the part where windows is booting. Shinova dosen't mention whether or not she has tried to boot into safe mode or not. Also she dosen't mention which windows version she has.

[Terr Fangbite]

My dad had a similar problem when he bought one of those gizmos. Make sure the harddrive cables are attached properly (and securely). That fixed his problem. Although your windows rebooting sounds like something else I've banged my head into a desk over.....

[Sokartawi]

Tested a malfunctioning harddrive for a client not too long ago, and that one also rebooted windows, if it had a partition on it and was formatted. Without partition windows loaded fine and I could see the harddrive in the controlpanel, so that shit was probably happening when windows gave a drive letter to it.

Two drives malfunctioning at once should indicate that it are not the drives but rather something else though, probably the docking station is messing up or something loose in there.

If it are Maxtor drives you might want to try powermax on the one that gets past the bios, sometimes it can tell what the problem is.

[Shinova]

Actually it boots all fine and dandy now (it's actually my dad's comp, and he's been consulting me over the phone for tech support from some 80 miles away).


Now the problem is he can't access his personal files (My Documents). I'm not actually on-hands there to see what's up. And he's using Windows 2000.