Well yeah…as you see i haven’t posted for 3 days, this was because of hardware issues, to be more specific my Hard drive gave up on me(died) and i needed to buy a new one.

It all started last week:

1. My pc didn’t want to recognize the hard drive at system start
2. It recognized it only after i moved the hard drive around and m kicked it once or twice(really)

At first i taught its because of the dust, so as i arrived home monday i opened up my PC and removed each and every removable part(RAM/PCI devices/Video card/hard drive/optical drives/IDE cables) and i cleaned out my pc.

I taught that solved it, but when i wanted to start up my pc same thing happened, so i reset the BIOS, putting a jumper on the CMOS pins…nothing happened, i read in a PC world magazine(yeah back in 2003 i used to buy PC world/PC magazine/Level(gaming magazine) ) that not every time Reseting BIOS from CMOS jumpers helps and the best thing to do is to remove the battery from the mainboard, and so i did, but still i was facing the same problem.

A friend suggested that i use other IDE cables, because maybe the connectors are broken, so i did that but still the same..

So i Had 3 options in my mind:

1. My hard drive is broken
2. My mainboard isn’t functioning well
3. The power supply is causing the problems

Time For testing!

I pulled out my Pentium 2 PC(Damn you have no idea how much it helps to have a secondary pc even if you only use it when you need to fix your other PC.) and i removed the 6.4GB Hard drive from it and hooked it up with my PC.

IT WORKED FLAWLESSY! At booting the pc recognized it immediately, and this was the thing that convinced me that my hard drive is broken

After 3 days of testing i finally found out what was the problem. Good thing it wasn’t the mainboard because that would have really been tragic for me.

The next day i hardly started up my PC with the hard drive and burned on a CD the 2 important designs that had to be finished by today. I realized that my hard drive started ticking and it just stopped.

Yesterday i went to the PC shop and bought a new hard drive for 52$(80GB excelsor w/ 8mb buffer), even though i lost all data from other hard drive i’m happy that my PC is working and i can continue work. My other hard drive(check picture) lasted 3 years of pain and suffering and extreme usage so no wonder it died.

Tomorrow i will hook up the defective hard drive and il try to start it up(i still have some PSD’s that i need(they are pretty unimportant but good to have) ) and hopefully i can pull the data i need.

So remember: If your pc isn’t working make sure you check all possibilities before you buy a new part, if you don’t do a detailed check you may end up buying a part that is functioning well -> waste of money.

If you don’t know how to fix PC’s and such i highly recommend you take your PC to service where experts can tell you what the problem is and what really needs to be changed.