Greetings,

I had a few troubles that made me believe I may have a failing hard drive. Long boot times and a few random crashes that seemed to have nothing in common with one another. A few times the computer simply failed to boot, giving a blue screen error.

I purchased a new sata drive and went to install it today. I plugged in the new sata drive as my pc had an available power cable and sata port on the mobo. At the same time I removed an old 40 gig ide drive which served no purpose (it was from an old pc and we plugged it in to retrieve some data, it was not a boot drive and had nothing of value to the system on it).

After plugging in the new sata drive, when I turned on the computer it did absolutely nothing. The power came on, internal fans started spinning but I did not hear the HD spinning and there was absolutely nothing going to the monitor. I double checked all the connections to find that everything was hooked up, no loose cables or anything else. Shut the PC off then turned it back on and still got nothing.

Unplugging the new sata drive, and leaving the old one plugged in as it was I turned the PC on again and it beeped at me. Two beeps roughly 2-3 seconds apart with a short pause of 4-5 seconds, then steady beeping 2-3 seconds apart. The monitor remains blank the entire time and displays the 'no signal' message. I have tried every combination of drives and this result is consistent regardless of which drives I have plugged in.

Any light that could be shed on this situation would be most appreciated.

Resolved by response on another forum. They responded to check memory and video card to be sure it hadn't been knocked loose. My response follows, included here in case someone encounters the same problem and sees this thread.



Well, everything was still nice and snug. The memory was settled cleanly into the brackets and the latches were solidly closed. However... I opened each latch and slipped the memory out, then resettled and latched it. Everything booted perfectly on the original drive, I have not yet messed with adding the new drive.

Glad it was something simple, odd that it would do that when all the memory was still locked in place.

The response was very much appreciated.

Thanks for the update.