V
Viking Mail
Hi all,
I'm having a strange problem with an e-machines 130 box that I've been asked
to look at. I was asked to fit a TS-H552 Samsung DVD RW, which went well
enough. The drive was initially jumpered as slave, but I set it to master
and the machines CD-ROM as slave on secondary IDE - purely because it was
easier to get them in the case that way round.
I noticed when the machine rebooted (Win XP Pro) that the HDD light
flickered as normal during the early stages of bootup, and then stayed
constantly lit even though I can hear that the HDD is doing nothing. Swapped
the drives around, but the problem persisted. Removed the CD-ROM without any
change. Removed the DVD RW and the LED behaved normally, put it back and the
light stayed on.
I initially decided that this was probably just an anomaly with this
particular combination of drives and mobo and was unlikely to do any harm.
However, barely two weeks after fitting the drive, I was asked to look at
the machine again. It seemed to be having endless HDD problems - couldn't
find files, or was complaining (intermittently) that the files were corrupt
and then opened them happily after a reboot. My first thought was some kind
of malware / virus infection, even though the machine is running NAV 2005
with latest defs, Ad-Aware, Spybot etc. Couldn't get the machine to boot up
and stay stable long enough to run any scans, so pulled the HDD and scanned
it in one of my machines. It was clean.
I reformatted and tired to reinstall XP with the CD in the DVD RW. Setup
happily reformatted the HDD, but fell over when copying files - couldn't
copy a dll, though I can't recall which, offhand. Tried to reinstall with
the CD in the CD-ROM drive, but came setup again fell over at the same
point. Tried a different XP Pro CD in both drives with the same result. I've
seen this kind of problem before when the HDD is bad, so I fitted a spare,
known good drive, and retried the setup with the same results. When I
disconnected the DVD RW, setup ran fine and XP is now reinstalled. BUT, if I
reconnect the DVD RW, the HDD light STILL stays on when XP has booted.
I've done some googling on this issue and it appears to be fairly common but
I've yet to find a fix, nor have I seen any suggestion that such could be
related to non-booting systems as described above. The machine belongs to a
novice user, so it's entirely possible that he may have trashed windows
somehow, but I'm a little concerned about the machine's refusal to install
XP with the DVD installed. Has anyone come upon this issue before, or have
any suggestions?
TIA
Rob Ashburn.
I'm having a strange problem with an e-machines 130 box that I've been asked
to look at. I was asked to fit a TS-H552 Samsung DVD RW, which went well
enough. The drive was initially jumpered as slave, but I set it to master
and the machines CD-ROM as slave on secondary IDE - purely because it was
easier to get them in the case that way round.
I noticed when the machine rebooted (Win XP Pro) that the HDD light
flickered as normal during the early stages of bootup, and then stayed
constantly lit even though I can hear that the HDD is doing nothing. Swapped
the drives around, but the problem persisted. Removed the CD-ROM without any
change. Removed the DVD RW and the LED behaved normally, put it back and the
light stayed on.
I initially decided that this was probably just an anomaly with this
particular combination of drives and mobo and was unlikely to do any harm.
However, barely two weeks after fitting the drive, I was asked to look at
the machine again. It seemed to be having endless HDD problems - couldn't
find files, or was complaining (intermittently) that the files were corrupt
and then opened them happily after a reboot. My first thought was some kind
of malware / virus infection, even though the machine is running NAV 2005
with latest defs, Ad-Aware, Spybot etc. Couldn't get the machine to boot up
and stay stable long enough to run any scans, so pulled the HDD and scanned
it in one of my machines. It was clean.
I reformatted and tired to reinstall XP with the CD in the DVD RW. Setup
happily reformatted the HDD, but fell over when copying files - couldn't
copy a dll, though I can't recall which, offhand. Tried to reinstall with
the CD in the CD-ROM drive, but came setup again fell over at the same
point. Tried a different XP Pro CD in both drives with the same result. I've
seen this kind of problem before when the HDD is bad, so I fitted a spare,
known good drive, and retried the setup with the same results. When I
disconnected the DVD RW, setup ran fine and XP is now reinstalled. BUT, if I
reconnect the DVD RW, the HDD light STILL stays on when XP has booted.
I've done some googling on this issue and it appears to be fairly common but
I've yet to find a fix, nor have I seen any suggestion that such could be
related to non-booting systems as described above. The machine belongs to a
novice user, so it's entirely possible that he may have trashed windows
somehow, but I'm a little concerned about the machine's refusal to install
XP with the DVD installed. Has anyone come upon this issue before, or have
any suggestions?
TIA
Rob Ashburn.