An idle thought: anyone ever heard of problems caused by a hard drive that was on the same IDE chain as the primary hard drive, but not connected to a power supply?
I replaced my PC’s old clicky 30 GB Maxtor hard drive (from my IBM desktop circa 2001) with a new Western Digital 160 GB 7200 rpm hard drive on Sunday, and also added an extra 1 GB (2 x 512 MB) of RAM. After that, I would periodically have complete freezes of the OS. Today they’ve been especially pernicious, sometimes not letting Windows make it past the boot screen.
I tried running a RAM diagnostic on the memory but after 6 passes it found no errors, so I figured that wasn’t the culprit. Just to be sure, I completely took out the new RAM (still froze up) and then put back in the new and removed the old (still froze up). So I figured, well, heck, it’s probably been about a year and a half since I installed Windows on this thing. Time for a refresh.
Rebooted, started the XP reinstall process, deleted my old partition, added a new one, formatted it, aaaaand… froze up copying Windows files to the hard drive. So that got me thinking. My IDE chain setup was as follows:
It’s currently three or four steps into the install process, so there’s no saying it won’t freeze up again, but I was wondering: has anyone ever heard of a PC having problems due to an unpowered hard drive on the IDE chain?