System will not boot when certain hard drive connected

I have a desktop with 3 hard drives: one for the OS, two for data. The system would not boot today. I disconnected and tested until I found that if I disconnect one of the two data drives, the system will start properly, although it complains about items installed on that data drive.

Does this mean the drive is dead? How can I diagnose this? I have never had a hard drive fail before.

This is an HP Pavillion. The drive is Seagate Barracuda, 7200.11 750 GB.

Edit: my situation is identical to this post: Computer hangs at BIOS screen. Cannot enter setup

Daniel Williams

Posted 2012-02-14T06:45:06.327

Reputation: 1 276

Answers

Does the drive spin up when you power on the computer? You may wish to try swapping cables between the data drives, or even rotating cables among all three drives.

If no cable configuration works, proceed to testing the drive in another computer (or try using an external hard drive casing). At any point if you gain access to the drive, quickly make a backup of important data from it.

If the data is important but the drive is completely dead and you don't have any backup, consider Sirex' tip or consider using data recovery services.

ADTC

Posted 2012-02-14T06:45:06.327

Reputation: 2 649

It does spin up, but as long as it is connected, the rest of the system will not start at all. It gets start in the BIOS message right after RAM is verified, but before the disks are discovered. – Daniel Williams – 2012-02-14T15:28:02.057

1Please indicate if you've tried swapping/rotating disks among the available SATA/IDE ports (and their cables). This is to ensure that the problem is with your hard disk and not a faulty port or cable. (In other words, does another hard disk work fine when you connect it to the cable/port that the non-working hard disk is currently connected to? And vice versa.) – ADTC – 2012-02-14T15:37:22.347

Yes, I swapped the connections, and on every connection that drive consistently caused the boot to fail. – Daniel Williams – 2012-02-15T03:21:30.290

Try on a different computer or with an external casing. The casing will probably allow the system to boot, and you can even plug in the casing after the system has already booted. – ADTC – 2012-02-15T05:43:16.403

My guess would be yes, the drive is dead. you may be able to swap the circuit board out for an identical one, but far easier is restore from backups and grab a new drive.

Sirex

Posted 2012-02-14T06:45:06.327

Reputation: 10 321

Backups? I don't need no stinkin' backups. Er, well, maybe I should have backed this one up, darnit. – Daniel Williams – 2012-02-14T15:34:39.367