One drive systems usually have no jumpers while two or more drive systems can have them installed. Set your errant drive as the slave and the master drive (the new one) as the master drive. Install the drive and screw securely while ensuring all power cables and connectors are set in their proper places before you power up. Partition the new drive if desired and format each partition (this ensures no malicious programs might have been innocently???? left in the drive during testing by the retailer or manufacturer) even if the retailer who sold you the drive says it is factory formatted. Re-install the OS, drivers and all the other programs; re-copy all the necessary files and you’re all set to go. Oh, don’t forget to take out the errant drive after you copy all your documents and files (the drive can fail and damage the computer if the controller board shorts due to failure of the mechanical parts damaging the rest of your computer including the new drive).

If you do not have a secondary drive, better get hold of one fast but try to determine the type of the drive the system board supports (IDE, SCSI, ATA or SATA) so you buy the right one. If the drive type is no longer available (most areas have already phased out IDE drives being replaced by SATA drives), then you might be in for more of an overhaul rather than a troubleshooting expedition. A change in most of the parts may be necessary and the files that have to be transferred might be done on another computer which still supports your drive type or by the computer shop should you like them to do so(for a fee of course. Professional data retrieval would be too expensive for the ordinary PC and the data stored in it). Remove the plastic sheath or case of the new drive and check the jumper settings.

Now, to make the secondary drive your primary drive (after you have transferred all necessary files to that said drive), open the casing and locate your hard drive. Don’t forget to discharge any static electricity by touching the casing for a few seconds to ground yourself discharging the offending static charge in your body. Turn the power off and remove all the cables from the rear and front of the casing. Unscrew the hard drives and try to find the master and slave which can be seen in the jumper settings near the drive connector, also disconnect the power supply from the drives. If you have managed to identify the master and slave drives, remove the failing drive and change the jumper setting of the slave to configure it into the master drive(this would be easier if the master and slave were both formatted with their own MBR’s or main boot records). Connect all necessary cables and power up your computer and begin the setup procedure of your OS. Once the OS is re-set-up, reinstall all applications, drivers and other programs you may need and you can now transfer the copied files to their rightful place for use.

Don’t count on system restore for this one for it only works best for software errors and not for hardware failure. If you do not have a secondary hard disk installed, or you might not have enough space to house all your files and the OS in the drive you were left with, then sadly you have to get a new drive to augment or replace the drive that is about to fail considering the fact that the failing drive hasn’t seized up yet. If that were the case, you can curse all you want but say good bye to all your documents and important files whatever type they may be.

Even new drives can crash if there was a problem within the manufacturing process. They have been tested and tested again before delivery to the store but defects do get through the testing programs. If you happen to have more than one drive on your PC, that would be nice and would make the copy process easier. Just select all the files you need and copy them into a temporary folder where you can retrieve them later in the other drive once it is set up to boot as the primary drive. The primary or master drive is the one that has the operating system installed onto it which in many cases would be Windows.

Well, this might not be a sound you would want to hear from your hard drive, for it might be in it’s death throes. The screeching sound may be the bearings that make the platters spin breaking down or they have been in use for so long they have worn out the hard metal coatings on the teeny tiny bearings. The first thing you do is to copy as much data that you can to another hard drive to prevent total disaster. Most drives will continue to function for sometime before total failure of the drive. You’ll be glad to know that they have become more reliable than ever but that does not mean totally.

If you experience frequent CPU failures and get feedback from the store that the power supply has blown. Try to get a larger capacity or higher rated power supply. You might have too many devices hooked up to the power supply (internal and externally) both of which take power from the same power supply if they have no individual power adapter. Say if you have a 300 or 400 watt power supply, try getting hold of a 500 watt or higher model and try to get the bit pricy one so it would last. Repetitive power supply failures can cause damage to the internal parts of your CPU and even the board itself which has built in fuses to protect the Microprocessor unit itself from such damage. If the board has also failed, you would have to get another board to transfer the cpu onto.

If your PC boots up but doesn’t load windows, then it might have simply been shut down without using the shutdown facility provided. Or it may have had a catastrophic failure on the part of the hardware such as the IDE/SATA controller or even the hard drive itself. To fix the first scenario, simply press F7 and select safe mode from the command line menu and follow all in-screen instructions. Some files or system drivers get damaged by such events so have the driver cd’s at hand. Once the check disk facility finishes, you should be able to gain access to your PC normally. If it still won’t load properly, try shutting down and re-starting for there might be some corrupted programs that need to be restored. Try getting the windows installation CD’s and re-install windows to restore all the damaged system files.

A stern warning to laptop users, these mobile computers of today seldom have installation cd’s that used to ship with them, instead they use a separate partition on the hard drive itself to store all the necessary drivers, software and other files to support your specific computer. So take heed and do the recovery disk creation process described in your user’s manual, it’s sure to save you a ton in costs of having to re-order them and shipped just to bring your computer/laptop back to life!

Some boards may simply have a two-pin configuration which if shorted can remove the errant password. Others motherboards require a few minutes for the BIOS to re-set and some require you to power the system up, then shutdown in order to return the jumper block into its previous position. After this, you would have to re-configure the BIOS to it’s previous settings so it would be a nifty idea to have a copy of these in a safe place. You can always have the manual to get the best optimal settings which would work for your system should you have a need to. The automatic settings that are built into the BIOS are not always the best setting to use but it will get you up and running in no time. Take time to understand each and every setting that you encounter (having the manual by your side makes it easier) and some boards even have descriptors which tells you which does what and what the default settings are.

A manual would be great and better for it eliminates mistakes which could not solve the problem at all and worse send you off buying a new board due to a short you created when you hastily did the operation. Boards come in several versions from several manufacturers, and if you’re like me who sticks to a select group of manufacturers, chances are they will have the overall same labels that allow easy understanding of the board even without the manual. If the reset pins come in the form of a three pronged arrangement, then there should be a jumper that shorts out two of them which in it’s current state would be the normal setting, switch the pins using the jumper and short the pins labeled reset, wait for a few minutes for the bois to reset then return the pins to the normal position. Some boards have labes some don’t and have numbers that have to be referenced with the manual.