PC making chirping noise (and then some)

[ryanbatc]

For about 2 weeks now my wife's Dell Dimension 2400 (P4 old school, bought in early 2003) has been making this annoying chirping sound. I thought it was a fan, but I got up close and could not hear anything abnormal from the fans. I think it's either an optical drive or the HDD.

We powered it up this morning and some sort of diagnostic screen came up saying something about two of the drives. (Now that I think about it it may have been the optical drives). She has two: a CD-ROM drive and a new DVD burner I installed a while ago (it has worked perfectly) I didn't think much of the message and it kept booting right to Windows XP...

Well, I put a CDR in because I wanted to back some stuff up (having bad feelings about the pc in general), but the computer will not recognize the CDR, let alone the drive. In fact it doesn't recognize any of the optical drives!

So I went into BIOS and sure enough, Unknown Device for both of them

I will shake around the cabling and stuff, but I wanted to post this first....

Here's the pic of the bios, does it look like the optical drives aren't there or what?

[Sirex]

make one of the cd drives (try the salve from 2ndry) a primary slave, see if its sees it.

if it does try the HDD in 2nd master, just to check don't start windows!!!!

if it does not see the HDD it could be an interface failure.

[Trooper110]

Could be a bad cable, after booting up a buddy's computer once it all of a sudden said there were no hard drives, this is pretty much a 10 minute down and then back up job that we were screwing with things. At first we figured maybe we fried something but it was an older box so we decided to swap out IDE cables as it had no SATA first. Turns out that the IDE cable that was in it was bad, not sure if we jarred something lose or if it had been going and the shut down and then restart did something. Might want to check your IDE cable in their first, it's an easy fix