Computer gets stuck at Detecting IDE Drives

[sjkilcoyne]

Hi,

My PC was working fine, then I left it alone for a couple of hours and came back to it showing the Detecting IDE drives screen. It was stuck there, so I reset the computer, and now that is as far as it gets. It won't let me enter the BIOS or boot settings as it is stuck by that point.

I don't have the details of my system set up with me at the moment as I've had to use a friend's computer to get on here. The PC is a couple of years old, and I am using a single hard drive, ATI Radeon (don't know the number off by heart I'm afraid).
I'll try and find these out if it helps, but could anyone suggest what could be the main causes of this?

Thanks,
Steve

[manwithnoname]

It might be the drive: I had a drive fail on me, booting would take a long time (the drive made a loud clicking noise)

You could remove the IDE drive the Detecting IDE should just fail, then see if you can get into BIOS.

[0iD]

Unplug the drive & see it it'll boot into the BIOS, if it will, the drive's possibly dodgy. If not, it's obviously something else.

[s_kinton]

Unplug your IDE devices one by one until you find the one causing the hang.