September 02, 2005
Who would have thunk?
So I've been having these odd problems with my PC for the last month or so. My disk would hang, beep, and make an odd racket. I made tried doing a fsck on it and it sort of helped, but not quite. I decided that I needed to copy the hard drive before I lost everything. I also decided to geek out a bit and put my disks in removable cases... But that's not the story.
So I got the disks into the cases and tried to make a copy of the disk using Ghost. It took about 2 hours to make the image backup. I still didn't see the problem with that. I had a backup and was confident everything was cool. So I went ahead and moved to the new removable cases (with an brand new disk drive) and hooked everything up. When I tried to start the computer, nothing would boot. There was just the quiet whir of the fans and not much else. I pulled out the old voltmeter and started checking things. It turned out my new cool and ultra geeky removable disk units caused a voltage drop. So now I had to run out and get a new power supply. This was getting to be quite a job.
So I installed the new power supply and sure enough, everything started up. I now wanted to make an image of the old disk onto the new disk so I would have yet another copy of my drive. What I noticed right away was that the new drive was quite a bit faster than the old drive. I did some testing and decided the old drive was realy broken. I tested a bit further and moved the SATA cables... the problem moved to the new drive. Hmmm this was getting interesting. I pulled both of the SATA cables off and did a bit of checking. To my surprise, the corner of one of the connectors was broken. This was causing the connector to wiggle and caused the initial problem. Now I have 2 perfectly good disk drives and I've learned to check the cables first. Go figure.
Posted by Hefe at September 2, 2005 06:28 AM
Comments
I had a similar problem with a broken connector. You have to put them on very carefully or they will crack at the keyed edge just like yours did.
Posted by: Bill at December 24, 2005 04:35 AM