COmputer will not boot

[alloutwar]

I have a MSi 875p motherboard with 1.5 gigs of ram, and a pentium 2.8
My hard drive is a Western Digital 740 raptor. When i boot my computer up, it is not recognizing the hard drive. I just goes through the boot agent screen and then says media tst failure, check cables. I bought a new ata cable, but the motherboard is still not recgnizing the drive, even with the bios settign set to automatically find it. this started teh other day when i got i n my case to dust it out. At first it was booting and tellin me that the dram timing was too tight but then it would not work at all. Someone please help with this, it has done this before but it cost 170 dollars for the gguy to do somethin tht took 5 or 10 min utes. Thanks

 

[ratchet]

Welcome to TSG.

I would try using Data Lifeguard Diagnostics to see if it can find it.
Then if it sees it you might try running Windows XP Recovery Console and try FIXMBR.

 

[Chrisseh]

Eeek, I just had a Western Digital hard drive blow up on me without notice the other day, and oddly enough I too have a MSI motherboard. What a strange coincidence. First try what ratchet suggested, and if that doesn't work, try hooking the drive up to another computer to see if it'll recognize the drive... it didn't work for me since my drive got magically fried, but who knows, it might work for you. Also, did you do any recent hardware upgrades inside your machine before the problem started?

 

[ryanjoachim]

Make sure you hd is set to master with the jumper settings on the hard drive.

Then try reseting the bios by removing the small battery on the motherboard for about 10-15 seconds.

 

[alloutwar]

how am i supposed to use that program in windows..my comp wont even bott to windows...? i am usign an old dell right now just to see if i can figure this out....i appreciate your guys help on this...

 

[alloutwar]

well it gave me an error code of 120 which says it is an anomaly, which means i have to buy a new copy of windows, whcih sucks...it is gonna cost me 3- 400 dollars to fix......

 

[Scorpion]

Can you plug that drive into another machine to see if you can access it. If you can, the problem is probably the mobo.

Scorp.

 

[alloutwar]

no the only other comp i have is a dell which does not have an ata port on the mobo...

 

[smash]

try another hard drive [a small one] if you have one, the cmos battery may be low so change it and if your bios is old it may not know about large hard drives

 

[alloutwar]

hmm i do not know it is the same hard drive i have been using since i got the computer....