Ive been having hard drive issues for the past 2 months. Being one to not want to risk it, I got a new hard drive right away. I however, can not make one work. After trying the first two I bought, returning them, and now on my 3rd one, Im thinking its not the HDD thats the issue, but something with my PC. Its an older model PC (2002) non-SATA, and has lots of upgrades that ive done over the years.

*The description:
My current (old and dying) HDD will still boot up, still run windows, and any app I want to run, it is just going out and being very loud about it. Whenever I hook up a new HDD in addition to the current one (on the slave side) the pc will not even boot. Power will turn on, the HDDs will spin, all the lights and fans power up, but I get no signal to the monitor. If I just disconnect the power to the new HDD everything goes back to normal and works fine. As I said above, this is the 3rd HDD I have tried and second brand. The Tech support for the HDD companys is super crappy as they only work for 4-6 hours a day and only in the morning most of the week. If anyone has any ideas as to what the issue could be feel free to let me know.

*What ive done:
I have moved jumpers several times
I have tried to boot from the single new drive
I have tried to give it more power by turning off all of my fans
I have gone insane because I dont know what is wrong

*PC specs:
2002 VPR Matrix Series 210 Model FT-6100
Intel D845EBT Motherboard
ATI 9600 pro video card
Western Digital 100gb HDD (current/old)
230w stock Power supply
2.53gh pent 4

New drive: 500gb Seagate PATA/100 16mb cache

Hello venix, welcome to PCHF.

Can you check to make sure you have enough power for all of that, 230w seems very low. Use eXtreme Power Supply Calculator v2.5 (click goLite), to calculate your Power Supply Unit requirements. If it's an old PSU, add upto 15% for capacitor aging.

yup, totally was the issue. I suspected the psu, but this confirmed it. New 500w and it works fine. Now the 7 day long hdd clone sucks, but at least it all turns on.

No prob's Venix, glad to hear your back up and running.

Marked as Fixed.