Sata Hard drive not being detected at all.. Help?

[benjaxx101]

my pc worked fine until yesterday I came to start working o my pc and the screen just displayed identifying IDE .o. and will not boot up cannot even enter the start up bios menu.
any help will be appreciated I have 2 sata Hd installed and had no previous issues.

 

[Saga Lout]

Are you certain you can't open the BIOS menus? It's crucial that you go in there to make sure both drives are being recognised and that the boot sequence hasn't been altered. You also need to be able to change to Boot from CD first in case you need to use your XP CD to run Checkdisk.

 

[Alaskan_IT]

yea, quite odd that you cant enter BIOS. Most PCs are either "ESC". "F2", or "F12". Give it another shot. Also, reseat all your Sata cables and power connections. Also, if it still isn't working, I would suggest using a different power rail, in case it is faulty, and different SATA cables.

 

[benjaxx101]

Thanks I disconnected the second HD and booted with HD which has the OS and it booted up, I reconnected the 2nd HD and tried rebooting and it failed again, My guess is that the second HD which I use to store larger files might be bad any suggestion how to check this?

 

[Alaskan_IT]

First, I would try to enter the BIOS with both HDDs attached and see if your boot order got messed up. The optimal order would be DVD, HDD1, HDD2, NIC, USB.

If this doesn't work, you can run diagnostics on the hard drive. What brand of computer is it? what is the HDD manufacturer?

 

[Saga Lout]

The optimal order would be DVD, HDD1, HDD2, NIC, USB.

Would not HDD0 have a place in that queue?

Reboot with only the system HDD in place and go from Start to Run thebn type in msconfig and hit Enter. Under the BOOT.INI tab, click to "Check all Boot Paths" and see if the system finds one which is inappropriate, then let it be deleted. Click Apply and OK your way out then after the restart, tick "Don't show this message again" and hit Enter. If there was a superfluous entry, you can restart again and this time with both drives connected but teh answer may still lie in the BIOS.

 

[Alaskan_IT]

Would not HDD0 have a place in that queue?

Reboot with only the system HDD in place and go from Start to Run thebn type in msconfig and hit Enter. Under the BOOT.INI tab, click to "Check all Boot Paths" and see if the system finds one which is inappropriate, then let it be deleted. Click Apply and OK your way out then after the restart, tick "Don't show this message again" and hit Enter. If there was a superfluous entry, you can restart again and this time with both drives connected but teh answer may still lie in the BIOS.

^haha, good catch. Did not notice I did that. He is correct. HDD0, then HDD1.