Installing a new hard drive on an old computer

My good ole computer at home really needed a new, bigger hard drive.
So I bought a new hard drive: a Barracuda 7200.7 80GB UDMA100. I connected it as slave on the first IDE channel (the master being the old hard drive with Win 98 -ugh- and Linux) and proceeded to install Win 2000 over it.
The installation and the first couple of reboots went fine, but on the following day I started having problems. When powering on, sometimes the fans and disks would start spinning, but the screen would remain black and nothing happened, not the usual starting screen with the technical info, not even the beep you get when starting booting.
Switching on and off a few times (with the usual 15 seconds between switches) got me to boot, and then everything was fine. But the following day (yesterday) no amount of switching would help. I also tried checking if the cards were seated in, twiddling with the monitor cable (in case it was damaged) and checking if the CPU fan was working.

The computer was working fine up until the previous day. What else can I check? I bloody hope it’s not the motherboard; I can’t afford it.

Some technical specs. The old computer has an Asus motherboard, model P2B-F with the latest BIOS update. The CPU is a Pentium 3 with 256 Mb of Ram.
There are two hard drives on the first IDE channel, the old one (an Ultra ATA 66 drive, can’t recall the brand) set as master, the new one set as slave. The secondary channel only has a CD writer set as master. The connectors are all seated in, but I’ll double check as soon as I get home.

Any ideas?

My first suspicion is that the addition of the new drive put too much of a load on the old power supply. The symptoms you describe are certainly suggestive of that. If you disconnect the new drive, will the system boot?

I didn’t try that, but I’ll certainly do it tonight. The power supply is relatively recent, but it might well be undersized.

bios upgrade sometimes is not enough :frowning:

i had to swap my entire motherboard to make my new hard drive work.

as far as i know hard disks dont take very much power ( refer to manufacturer specs, but its about 12 watts ) also you might find some data on the side of your power supply as to how much it can feed to the hard disks.

i doubt it is a power supply though. if you had switched from a Celeron to Athlon then a power supply could be suspect :slight_smile:

regardless, its good to have a quality power supply, that will give stable, noise-free power to all your components. this is the power supply i have in my desktop :

http://store.yahoo.com/directron/sl450.html

i recommend it. my Athlon used to crash every few hours on a cheapo generic 250Watt PSU but it never crashes on this one. but like i said, i doubt your problem is with the PSU.

i have to mention though, that i also upgraded the CPU cooler at same time, but its not like my CPU was overclocked or anything, so stock cooler should have been enough. but it might have helped too.

I also had boot-up problems after adding a hard drive. One thing I found was that the two hard drives, being practically on top of each other, got very hot. I got an extra fan to blow right on them; this helped a lot. Another thing is, I often have to re-seat the communication cable. I don’t know how they are figeting around inside that box, but the cable seems to work loose sometimes.

Curse you…Now I’ve got Slade’s “Keep Your Hands off my Power Supply” crashing through my head…and I don’t own a record player anymore so I can’t scratch that itch.
Just added 160gig HD to my 1999 Compaq. I’m also running it as a slave (love computer lingo!) to my 4 gig and ain’t having any trouble. Just thought I’d rub it in a little. I do hope you get it figured out & corrected, though. I hate it when I start out to do something GOOD and then end up much worse off than before…and unable to even UNDO the atempt.

So I checked the power supply and it’s a 375 watts. More than enough, I hope, for a Pentium 3 @ 500 MHz, two hard drives and a CD writer.
Anyway, I also tried something else. I set the HD to be autodetected at boot, rather than putting its parameters in once and for all. And now the computer works again. That’s something I really have no idea how to explain.
I could just keep it like this, but my worry is that it was already working fine when I put the new drive in, and then it suddenly started having problems. So I still suspect there’s something amiss, something I wouldn’t like to come back and bite me.

Thanks for all the suggestions.