New 120gb hard drive: $100
New drive cable: $19.00
Finally getting my son’s computer working again: Priceless
What a painful journey. I’m still not really sure what solved the problem but I think it came down to using a bad drive cable and improper jumper settings on the hard drive.
I had issues getting Windows XP to install on his current 120gb drive. Windows would see the drive, start the installation process, then it would not reboot saying there was an error with the drive. I ran Scandisk on the drive and it told me that the drive was physically damaged. So, I ordered a new hard drive and went through the whole process again. Same error message.
Through a process of elimination I decided to try a new cable. I started out connecting both drives with them jumpered for CS or “cable select”. When I booted the machine up the drives weren’t recognized. I then specifically jumpered them as master and slave and cabled them up accordingly (blue connector to the motherboard, gray to the slave and black to the master) and voila, success.
I was able to get XP installed and then I partitioned and formatted the other drive. It seems to be working fine at this point. I have to guess that the scandisk error was caused by the faulty cable.