PCA Forums

Your fixing a desktop pc which does not boot - hangs at BIOS screen. It looked like and sounded like the HD, so I fire up SpinRite and it finds sectors that it can't read. I let it run all night. In the morning, I take a look at the progress, and it's only at 7%. WTF? All the sectors it corrected were shown as recovered. Hum...

So I stop it and decide to restore an old 1 year image I had on another spare HD. My backup program could not see the HD, even though it was shown in the BIOS bootup screen. Hum...

The root cause? BAD CABLE!

Yeah. I always try replacing the cable and spraying the connectors with contact cleaner before trying to refresh a drive. On rare occasions it's even possible to corrupt the data by trying to run Spinrite on it with a bad cable.

Admittedly this is rare with SATA cables, because since they're serial they usually either work or they don't. This used to be a much bigger problem with the old IDE cables.

Aww, man!! I would have been PISSED OFF for sure. Glad you found the problem though.