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View Full Version : Disk I/O error Replace the disk, and then press any key


zelmo73
09-18-2003, 08:09 PM
I have an old custom-built Athlon 800 system with a Duron motherboard, 2 40 GB Maxtor 7200 hard drives with one permanently disabled, and a 500 watt power supply.

Here's what happened. A couple of weeks ago, my old power supply crapped out on me. It turns out that I was cranking out 375 watts through an old 250 watt power supply (2 40 GB hard drives, an ATI Radeon 9000 Pro video card, 2 CD drives, 640MB PC133 RAM, the motherboard, and a big cooling fan was what was running on it at the time). Anyway, I got somebody to install a new 500 watt power supply in my computer, but when I finally got it back home on Sunday night, I couldn't access my hard drive.

The hard drive that I was using was my old slave drive, because my primary hard drive died on me last year, but I never got around to taking it out of the machine. After messing around with the CMOS jumpers and BIOS, I managed to turn the old slave drive into my primary drive.

But now, I keep getting this Disk I/O error message, and I'm kind of at a loss as to how to continue. The hard drive is still being detected in the system BIOS, it just won't access it upon bootup.

I was going to take out the old primary drive and put the slave in its place anyway, but I was talking to my dad earlier and he said that there might be a switch that I might have to adjust on the hard drive in order to get it to work again. I was wondering if you guys could give me any pointers? Thanks!

Suicides-by-Steve
09-19-2003, 07:04 AM
Change the jumpers on the back of the drive from slave to primary, this is probably the problem right there... Also, if I were you, I would move the slave into the primary's position, and move it on up the IDE cable. As well, you are going into your BIOS and making sure that it's the slave that's being enabled, right?

Aku
09-20-2003, 02:36 PM
How do you best check how much power your computer is using? I blew out my 350 watt power supply a month ago, and have another 350 watts in there now. The first one may have just had a bad fuse, but I'd like to know. How could that older rig have been using 375 watts?! The only thing unusual about it was that it had two hard drives, but my old machine had two hard drives, plus a zip drive, and ran for years on 250 watts. Did this machine have a lot of things plugged into it that didn't have their own power source?

Aku
Shapeshifting Master of Dobian