If Your Hard Drive Light Remains On Continuously But The Drive Is Not Accessible
The boot drive can not be located. Check to see that the signal cable is inserted with the proper orientation (that it is not reversed at one of the two ends).
Replace the drive with a known, good, drive (remember to change the CMOS Setup settings if you do this). If the good drive works as you expected, then the replaced drive is bad. If it does not work as expected, you may need to replace the disk controller or the motherboard.
If your drive spins up when power is applied, but then rapidly spins down again:
Make sure the 4-pin power connector is inserted securely into your drive. If your drive is on a Y-connector make sure any other connections are secure.
Make sure the signal cable from the motherboard to the hard drive is securely seated. Check for frayed edges or other damage to the cable. If it is an EIDE cable, make sure that the red stripe that you see on one side of the cable is aligned properly with pin 1 on the disk.
Try a new signal cable.
Check that the jumpers are set correctly on your drive(s) and that the primary drive is set as master, and the secondary or slave, if existent, is set as slave.
Replace the drive with a known, good, drive (remember to change the CMOS Setup settings if you do this). If the good drive works as you expected, then the replaced drive is bad.
If, after completing the installation process for a SCSI drive, the drive's LED does not show on/off activity when the host is trying to communicate with the drive:
A duplicate SCSI ID setting may be the problem. If this is the case, change the ID so that each device on the SCSI chain has its own unique ID. If the SCSI IDs are all unique, make sure that your SCSI chain is terminated properly.
If you see a "Sector not found" error message on your computer monitor you likely have a non-catastrophic media problem with your hard drive, mostly likely some sectors are going bad. This commonly happens to older drives:
Use a disk utility to evaluate the drive and then locate and map out any bad sectors. If you have a large number of bad sectors, you might consider getting a low-level format utility from your drive manufacturer, backing up your drive, doing a low-level format, and then reformatting and restoring your drive. This may help you to recover some of the bad sectors.
If you suspect that your boot sector has been corrupted or destroyed, and that this has not been caused by a virus, you should try running FDISK with the /MBR parameter. This command will replace your master boot record without altering the partition table at the end of the sector.
If running FDISK /MBR does not work, you will need to run a full FDISK and then DOS FORMAT on your drive. This is a drastic step and will destroy the data on your hard disk. Before you do so, you can boot off of a start-up floppy and try to backup any critical data that may not be on your most recent system backup.
If your computer fails to load the operating system on a cold boot, but seems fine when you do a reset (warm boot):
It is possible that your hard drive is not powering up in time for the cold boot to execute properly.
Check your CMOS Setup and make sure the POST has not been disabled. If it has, the lack of the RAM test may be giving your disk inadequate time to spin up before the operating system is loaded.
Your CMOS Setup may give you an option to enable or disable the "Quick" POST. Make sure you are running the full POST (as opposed to the quick). This longer POST includes a more in-depth memory test, and may provide your disk sufficient time to spin up before the operating system is loaded.
Alternatively, your CMOS may have a Power On Delay/Boot Delay option that will allow you to specify a time in seconds to delay the boot process. This is usually disabled, and should be unless you are experiencing this problem.
Your hard drive's performance seems to be degrading over time, getting slower and slower.
Boot from a boot floppy and make sure there are no drivers or Terminate but Stay Resident (TSR) programs being loaded.
Check for viruses.
Run a defragmentation.
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