OSx86 Installation: Hard Drive Failure (Before BIOS POST)

[foodfightr]

For a few days I had been playing with different distros of OSx86 and had Tiger working perfectly from an IDE drive. I have two Raptor 150GB drives. They were in raid 0 when I was running windows, but I set them to be individual drives for OSx86 installation. I unhooked one of the two drives and attempted to install OSx86. I reformated the drive to HFS+ filesystem and it worked fine. However during installation I realized I had the wrong settings and elected to cancel the installation.

 

Now my computer won't boot with the hard drive connected. My LanParty Ultra-D will display the LanParty logo that appears when the computer is first turned on- then it just stays there. If I disconnect the drive it boots fine. I tried booting with both drives and had the same issue. I just can't get past this screen with the HD connected!

 

Frustrated, I assumed it could be a motherboard issue. I unpluged the "faulty" hard drive and tried with the other raptor. No problem booting! I tried using the same cables/connections with the "faulty" drive and had the same problem. At this point I ruled out the mobo / cables as a possibility of causing the problem and assumed the HDD was the problem.

 

I switched to the other Raptor and attempted the same thing. I started the installation, got to the same point and cancelled. Same problem. Now I can't boot with either drive. I need to recover my hard drives! I think I may just use these SATA drives for windows at this point. How can I save my hardware? Somehow I need to boot it up and reformat to NTFS and install windows, but I can't get past the initial "bios logo."

[frizbot]

Not likely? Sounds like a hardware failure.

 

Try booting with a boot CD to reformat the drive (be sure of the boot order in BIOS), like Ultimate Boot CD. If a low level format doesn't clear the problem, it's probably best to destroy the disk. Throw it out if there's nothing important on it. Recovery using UBCD, Spinrite, or a professional recovery company are options if it had important data.

[foodfightr]

BUMP - I completely rewrote the first post with much more details and testing.

[mrjoe]

Nice one- you wanted to replicate an error

 

on an expensive 10k rpm disk (150GB)

 

No offense, but that's just...

 

$170 dollars down the drain

[foodfightr]

Worst case scenario is RMA. I don't see why these couldn't be fixed though.

[frizbot]

I don't use RAID, but it sounds like you took it out of RAID. Lets just assume that nothing RAID-related is causing the problem since I can't help with that.

 

Turn the BIOS logo off so you can see where it's stopping. Try the "faulty" hard drive on another motherboard. In BIOS, ensure that the "faulty" HD is not set to be booted first, but that CDROM/USB is. Use ultimatebootcd.com to load the WesternDigital utility and do a low level format (or just reinitialize/reformat the drive). If you can't get that far, it sounds like a hardware failure. Since it's a new drive, you can RMA it for a replacement.

 

In your original post, you said the drive started making soft clicking noises. It actually is possible for software drivers to change how the drive sounds by operating it differently, though it should be unlikely since the drive's firmware should handle that...It's happened before anyway. However, a change in how the drive sounds generally indicates a mechanical fault. Is the drive spinning up on boot? Is it vibrating? Is it making seeking noises? It's strange that your motherboard isn't alerting you to a SMART failure, though failed drives don't always fail SMART first.

 

If you can't get it back with software means, RMA the drive. If you need to recover files, find a professional company to do that.

[foodfightr]

I don't use RAID, but it sounds like you took it out of RAID. Lets just assume that nothing RAID-related is causing the problem since I can't help with that.

 

Turn the BIOS logo off so you can see where it's stopping. Try the "faulty" hard drive on another motherboard. In BIOS, ensure that the "faulty" HD is not set to be booted first, but that CDROM/USB is. Use ultimatebootcd.com to load the WesternDigital utility and do a low level format (or just reinitialize/reformat the drive). If you can't get that far, it sounds like a hardware failure. Since it's a new drive, you can RMA it for a replacement.

 

In your original post, you said the drive started making soft clicking noises. It actually is possible for software drivers to change how the drive sounds by operating it differently, though it should be unlikely since the drive's firmware should handle that...It's happened before anyway. However, a change in how the drive sounds generally indicates a mechanical fault. Is the drive spinning up on boot? Is it vibrating? Is it making seeking noises? It's strange that your motherboard isn't alerting you to a SMART failure, though failed drives don't always fail SMART first.

 

If you can't get it back with software means, RMA the drive. If you need to recover files, find a professional company to do that.

 

 

Yeah its strange. I took the drives out of raid and used the system for a while- it worked fine. So we know its not raid related.

 

It happened on both of the raptors individuall. I hooked up only one of them, reformated them to MAC and then realized I forgot to uncheck the languages/x11 packages and cancelled the installation. Upon rebooting the computer would not turn on with the drive connected.

 

I tried clearing the CMOS, which didn't help. I'll try booting with the graphic disabled and the HD connected. If that doesn't work I'll try hooking the HD up to another computer for formatting.

 

Thanks!