Second Hard drive crashed.. 99

[Guest]

I have a secondary hard drive (120Mg western digital) that worked fine for
over a year. I have a dell dimension 4600 and Windows XP home SP2. A couple
of months ago my machine started booting to a black screen. The windows
screen appeared the the whole thing went black and stopped booting and I had
to shut down. I removed the secondary hard drive and was only able to get the
computer to work in VGA mode after several tries. I Deleted the vid card
drivers and re-installed vid card software and all is fine. However if I
attach the second hard drive the whole process starts again?? In addition the
fan does not work with or without the second drive. Occassional I get message
"Processor fan not detected"? It was previously suggested that this may be a
power supply issue and to download Motherboard manager. The Dell 4600 is not
supported? Anyone else experience similar issues??

 

[Chelsea]

The boot failure might well be due to the processor overheating rather than
the second hard drive-remember hard drives generate quite a bit of heat and
2 hard drives even more. The boot process is very processor and hard drive
intensive, the processor may well be working at 100% capacity. To give you
some idea a processor will go from room temperature to over 60 degrees
centigrade in less than a minute with a working CPU fan-without one the
temperature gets out of control very quickly-the first thing to do is
therefore open your case-which is easy and switch the thing on and observe
the fan-you shouldn't have much trouble telling if it is working. Having the
case open will in itself aid cooling-if your cpu fan is working it may not
be efficient enough to keep everything stable-a good additional test is to
take a household cooling fan and direct the air into the PC case. If the PC
gets past the boot phase and remains stable then buy a better cpu fan-a good
one costs around £20. You can also get hard drive cooling fans for around £5
on eBay. Also check the fan on the graphics card-if there is one.

Chelsea