Motherboard stopped recignizing my HDD's?

[maddogmark25]

System Specs:
MSI P43-C51
Q9650
GTX480
4GB DDR3 @ 1333
HDD(s): WD Caviar Black 320GB @ 7200

Ok, so now my problem:

Over the past few weeks, my motherboard stopped recognizing my 320gb hard drive. I've been getting the lovely please reboot and select proper boot device. When I enter BIOS, only my cd/dvd drive is detected. I've gone through every single option I ttn think of, I've gone through and made sure STATE HDD's are enabled, I've switched cables, tried different SATA ports, I reset the CMOS barrery, reset the jumpers, I bought a new hard drive (same brand and size) to see if it was hard drive failure, but that didn't help the problem.

Every one in a while I will get lucky and the mobo randomly recognizes the hard drive, but this usually is only for a short time and then randomly will stop recognizing the drive and give me a blue screen. I don't understand why it won't detect my HDD's but will detect my cd/dvd drive.

Is there anything I can do, short of buying a new mobo? (Which means a new CPU, because of the outdated socket...so definetly not my favorite choice.)

 

[callahanp1]

If the drive just disappeared, you may have a bricked drive. There are drives from certain manufacturers that can disappear completely after a power on. The problem is that the firmware needs to be updated. The catch is that you need to be able to see the drive in the bios to update the firmware.

But all may not be lost.

I had a 500gb drive do the brick thing a few weeks ago. I googled and found that the manufacturer will upgrade the firmware and ship the drive back to me. this issue affects certain manufacturers and certain drives. Don't toss yours out until you check.

I did that and their recovery service says they were able to put the firmware on. No Charge for that! They encouraged me to use their very expensive data recovery service because the drive had so many bad sectors. (250 is a lot and indicates that the drive is "Failing". My data is not critical so I sent a reply to their e-mail stating that I was aware that the drive "Might not work". My guess is that when it comes in on Tuesday, I'll find it works just fine for long enough for me to grab some data.


Whatever. If i can read it, fine, if not fine... Either way, I'll make a warranty claim.

AND I'll check for firmware updates on every other drive I have.

 

[maddogmark25]

So both hard drives would be bricked, my old one and my new one? And I was able to check the firmware on the new one and it is fully updated.