Coputer won't recognize drive

[Chacotaco]

I am having a problem with my gateway pentium 3. I just installed Server 2003 and it worked fine for a while. But then i tried to add two more hard disks and it stopped working. Now it won't recognize any hard drive. I tried to move the jumpers around, i tried two other drives but i can't get it to recognize even one disk. I tried a new IDE cable. It just goes to the pre-X boot window and then says OS not found. I would appreciate any help.
Thank you

 

[dagonoth]

If you remove those 2 extra drives, does it return to how it was before? If it works again without the 2 new drives it could either be something wrong with those drives or your power supply isn't powering them correctly.

 

[Chacotaco]

Thanks for replyiing. It doesn't return to the way it was. I can't get it to boot, even with just the original drive. Then i tried all three drives one at a time and still couldn't get it to boot.

 

[Codesmith]

Whenever you add a drive you have to change the boot order in the CMOS setup.

No problem caused by simply adding two additional drives cannot be solved by removing those drives and returning everything to its original condition.

Either you did made more changes than what you are saying or something just happened to break by coincidence.

Might be a good idea to double check those jumper and BIOS settings with just the original drive attached.

Running a full drive self test on all the drives wouldn't be a bad idea.

 

[Chacotaco]

I put the original drive back the way it was. Then i tried putting the jumper on the other settings one at a time. Then i tried a different ide cable. Then i tried to hook up the other drives one at a time. There really wasn't anything else to change. I tried to change it in the BIOS but under the ide section on hard drives it says "none". The cd rom drive shows up though. IS there anything else that could have went bad like the disk controller?

 

[MCGTech]

I put the original drive back the way it was. Then i tried putting the jumper on the other settings one at a time. Then i tried a different ide cable. Then i tried to hook up the other drives one at a time. There really wasn't anything else to change. I tried to change it in the BIOS but under the ide section on hard drives it says "none". The cd rom drive shows up though. IS there anything else that could have went bad like the disk controller?

Since it's detecting the CD the controller is probably fine. You can try Moving the cable from the CD to the HD and see if it's detected but I suspect it's a power problem. Repeated plugging and unplugging of the molex power connectors on the HD can cause them to get sloppy. The contacts in the connector are split cylinders and can be tightened with a small screwdriver (gently please, power off). You can also try a different power connector on your boot drive but definately be sure to tighten the others if that's the case.