Hi,
I've been trying to get an old system running for a little bit now and after a lot of testing I've found that when the hard drive is not plugged in, it will POST fine but if it is, it freezes during the Detecting IDE part. I have tried to different IDE ribbon cables and the same thing happens both times. I suspect that the drive is bad but I don't have a second drive to test with. Is there any way to know whether a drive is dead? It's not VERY old and was actually in pretty good condition, so I don't want to throw it out without being 100% sure.
Edit: Something else I noticed. Removing the jumper has teh same effect as unplugging the IDE cable. Not sure if this information means anything but thoght I would throw it in there.