[ClaretCharlie]

Hi guys,

i'm having trouble finding a solution to a problem a friend of mine is having with his (former) external hard drive.
There's a small story to it so bear with me.

Sometime late last year he asked a friend of his (not me) to format his hard drive and as back-up he used a Freecom 400gb external HDD. So once he's transfered all the files he wants backing up he whips out the USB cable without doing the safely remove thing and formats the internal hard drive of the pc.

Now he did something strange to the pc because since he formatted it the system wasn't recognising the monitor at all. As if the monitor didnt exist but i had a look at it a few weeks ago and fixed that problem and then installed his copy of XP on it.

Anyway, this external hard drive didnt work when he plugged it into the usb port on his laptop nor did it work on any other system. Its like the montior problem where it just isn't recognised by any pc, except that the power light comes on (solid and steady) and you can hear it spinning. The spinning however sounds like starting then stopping - almost like a CD drive failing to read a scratched CD, but faster.

So, i've looked online and there were a few suggestions that other people have received which included putting it in the freezer overnight and trying again, or removing the external enclosure and plugging it into the slave of the IDE hard drive already in a system.

So far i've tried the latter but it hasn't worked and i'm getting an error message that hopefully you'll be able to help me with.

first i tried booting up and the boot stopped when it was searching for DHCP with a / which was rotating.

i rebooted and pressed F8 to skip the scan it was doing (sorry, i didn't write down that info) and something different happened and it started searching for something.
Anyway, i'm getting the error message below

Client Mac Addr: 00 13 D3 04 F4 F8 Guid: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
PXE-E51 No DHCP or ProxyDHCP offers were received

then it starts searching for them leading to another instance of that error message.


Any help and advice would be appreciated.

Thanks, Charlie

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That error that you are getting generally means that the computer is trying to boot from a network drive.
It has also been linked to other things.

1. Make sure the boot order is set so that it boots the hard drive before the network drive.
2. Some people have reported that a reset on the bios will clear the problem. Usually there is something it bios like "reset to default". Or actually pulling the cmos battery out for a while.
3. There are reports that resetting (remove and reinstall) the cables in the computer.
4. Also a hard drive failure.

[123Runner]

That error that you are getting generally means that the computer is trying to boot from a network drive.
It has also been linked to other things.

1. Make sure the boot order is set so that it boots the hard drive before the network drive.
2. Some people have reported that a reset on the bios will clear the problem. Usually there is something it bios like "reset to default". Or actually pulling the cmos battery out for a while.
3. There are reports that resetting (remove and reinstall) the cables in the computer.
4. Also a hard drive failure.

[ClaretCharlie]

fixed it, sorry.

I completely forgot about the jumpers.

sorry for wasting your time, i'm an idiot.