Problems detecting hdd

[helsinki98]

Hello i am having some troubles with my computer, to cut a long story short i managed to disable all the ports on my computer such as usb, mouse and keyboard etc so i have no way of controlling them once windows starts to load up. I can get into bios ok and the keyboard and mouse work their but not once my pc begins to load up windows.

To try and solves this i was going to either download ubuntu or buy windows 7 and put it onto my spare hdd in the computer. This issue with this is that i am currently having troubles getting hold of this hdd and it isn't even being picked up from the bios. The hdd has worked in the past, about a year ago i was using it as storage space for fraps files from games and then one day it stopped appearing on my hard drive list. I recently noticed it had come back before i ruined my pc but now when i look in bios i can't seem to find it. Can anyone give me any advice to how i can find it and just in case what area of the bios i should be looking in for it.

Any help is much appreciated, cheers.

 

[Paperdoc]

I would be very worried about planning to use as the new main C: drive a unit that appears and disappears. Not reliable.

"Disable all the ports" sounds to me like you deleted all the Windows drivers for those devices. You may be able to get them all back and working again with a two-step process, PROVIDED you still have the original Windows Install disk. It's called a Repair Install.

Place the Windows Install disk in your optical drive and ensure in the BIOS Setup screens that the machine is set to boot from your optical drive first, then the HDD second. Boot from the Install disk and do NOT do a normal installation. Instead choose the Repair Install option. What that does is take an inventory of all the hardware devices in your machine and all the device drivers already installed in Windows. Then it looks at what is missing and installs those drivers from the Install Disk. Now, these are drivers from Windows from some time ago, so they may not be optimal, and there might even be a few the install disk does not have. But this process will put you at a point comparable to when you first installed Windows, as far a driver status is concerned. It will NOT change anything else or alter or lose any of your files. That should get all your key devices working once you reboot with NO disk in the optical drive.

When you do this, I suggest you disconnect temporarily any extra devices you don't need, like custom audio cards in the PCI bus or external drives on the USB system. You can add those back in later, and they will install their drivers at that time.

Once you have your system running on Windows' default drivers, look closely at the driver installation utilities that may be on an optical disk that came with your mobo - it has custom drivers for all the mobo's devices, so you may want to install them in place of the Windows default drivers. I recommend you also update ALL of your drives to the latest versions for your system. That's the second step.

Last part will be to re-connect any extra devices you disconnected earlier so their drivers are installed, then update those drivers, too.

I would hope this process will get your machine running again smoothly under your original OS. Then you can tackle the questions of why your second HDD is intermittent, and whether you want to change to Win 7.

 

[helsinki98]

Thanks for the detailed reply!
I have taken the side off of my pc and i just unplugged and re plugged all of the wires leading into my second hdd and it now appears to be working so i assume it was a that a cable had come loose (i recently moved my pc to uni accomidation so might have been moved during the car journey) Unfortuantley i do not have the windows disk and won't until next monday, due to my work schedule i require a computer so i am currently installing unbuntu onto my other hard drive and then booting in that and renableing the HIDs Hopefuly this will work, if not i will have to wait till next week i suppose. Once i have fixed this i still have the task of trying to sort out my dpc latencies.

 

[Paperdoc]

Glad you have a work-around that does the job for you for now. By the way, disconnecting and re-connecting data and power cables (at both ends) is one of my first and favorite techniques. It is easy (just don't use too much force, and don't disconnect something else) and free. It does two jobs - one being fixing a connector that has worked itself loose. The other is that all metal contacts develop a thin oxide film over time that can actually become an insulator, at least intermittently. The disconnect / reconnect action (repeat a few times each) will "scrape" that oxide layer back down to clean metal, restoring the contact.