[SOLVED] Hard drive won't boot,CPU fan runs and shuts down

[jerome1232]

It's gotta be the hard drive, you plugged it into another machine and that machine refused to boot as well. Is it possible for you to test another known good working hard drive?

A slight bump while a hard drive is powered off and not in use shouldn't do anything to it, takes a good shock to knock the heads about. (I've dropped my current one two feet onto a tile floor once, that worried me but it was fine)

At first I was thinking power supply (when you plug the hard drive into the system the power supplies max wattage is exceeded and the system doesn't boot). After all over time power supplies tend to deliver less and less power.

[meindian523]

Ok, that rules out a lot on the board.
It looks like your problem is going to be somewhere from the IDE Bus to the HDD.
Start cheap. Try a new ribbon cable.

Are you sure about that?We tried,as mentioned above,in a separate PC,which had a separate data cable and power supply.In short,I had taken the naked HDD,no cables attached.

Try and borrow a HDD to test in the machine. If a known good drive works, then your drive is dead or dying, start looking at data recovery.
If the known good drive and known good cable don't work, you've got a problem with the IDE Bus on the board. You can buy an PCI to IDE card, or just look at upgrading the computer.

Ok.I think the only possibility as a summary is that either the HDD is going bad or the power circuits on the HDD are shorting out somewhere.

Thing is how does the HDD start dying all of a sudden?I booted into it this morning,at 1400 hours.There was no problem then,no corrupt files,etc.
And how again,do circuits short out all of a sudden?

[meindian523]

I think I should mark this thread solved seeing as what can be done is only hardware issue,and no problems with the motherboard,etc.

[JohnLM_the_Ghost]

And always remember when carrying sensitive hardware outdoors, it shouldn't be powered for at least 15 minutes when carried back to PC (or other device).

Could you explain please?

That one is not for this case but an advice in general. If you carry hardware through humid and/or cold air the device (HDD in this case) is prone for condensate build-up. If you hook up this device to power it can short-circuit. (From my experience I've had a PC's PSU literally exploding when turned on right after carried back indoors)

It's not making any funny noise,in fact it's not making noise at all.

No noise at all is also not good sign.
Make sure it spins up and does head-seek (eg. makes subtle spinning sound and few clicks).