Problem recognizing HDD

[alukah]

Hello!

First a brief story about my problem:

I first had an old 80GB IDE HDD, which worked perfectly fine, then bought a 500GB SATA HDD using the 80GB one for Windows and 500GB for storage, eventually I decide to install Windows in the 500GB HDD and format the other thinking it could make read/write faster, after a short time it started giving me a lot of blue screens and such and eventually my 500GB HDD died, so I reinstalled windows in my IDE HDD.

The problem began when I tried to remove the SATA HDD, suddenly my BIOS stopped detecting my IDE drive as well, and as soon as I connected the dead SATA HDD both HDD were recognized, I've tried many things and couldn't manage to get my IDE drive be connected independent of the other drive.

While this is not a critical problem (I can use my PC perfectly fine with both drives connected) I really want to get rid of that dead HDD, any ideas?

Spoiler

This is not relevant for the topic, but maybe I can figure out if my conclusions about my dead HDD were true, if i need to open a new topic for this please tell me.

When it stopped working properly the sympthoms were basically read and write problems, my pc ended up frozen when I tried to access/move/delete files, either that or speed was drastically slow (a few KB/s) A quick search around the Internet sent me to the conclusion that it got somehow damaged. Tried a low lvl format with Western Digital's recovery software and it failed to fix it, so my last theory was that it suffered from (permanent) physical damage. How true can this be?

 

[szaboaz]

The motherboard type could be relevant information for anybody who would like to help.

 

[alukah]

Oh, it's ECS G31T-M7

http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Product/Product_Detail.aspx?DetailID=897&CategoryID=1&DetailName=Feature&MenuID=16&LanID=0

 

[ashutoshgupta]

investigate taht your mother board supports sata or more than 250 GB HDD.....

 

[alukah]

It supports it, it's said in the first page of the website I linked (and if it has sata ports...)

The HDD I'm trying to leave connected is the 80GB one, not the 500GB. Besides, neither the website nor board manual say anything about HDD limits, and I used both HDD for some good months until it started to fail.

 

[szaboaz]

When someone has two HDDs and installs Windows 7 for example, it sometimes happens that the boot partition goes to one HDD and the system partition goes on the another. When the one with the boot partition gets removed, the other one can't boot anymore.
But in your case, it's not just that it can't boot, it can't even be *detected* by the BIOS?? Very strange.


I wonder, if there's some setting in BIOS, maybe a boot order setting, which doesn't get reseted, when the drives are removed.
You could create a copy of the current settings (on paper, or you can create photos if you will), and apply "Load Default Settings".


I'm looking at the pdf manual:
http://eudownload.ecs.com.tw/dlfileecs/manual/mb/eng/p4/G31T-M7/G31T-M7_v7.pdf
Page 33, Integrated Peripherals
Onboard IDE Controller.

This is enabled, right? (But it's silly to ask, I know, since it wouldn't work at all if this was disabled... but it does work together with the SATA drive... Strange...)

 

[alukah]

Yup, it is enabled. Also loaded default settings and didn't fix it.

I tried disabling SATA controller from that menu and it happened as if I disconnected my SATA disk, both disks were unrecognized.

 

[szaboaz]

I'm just shooting in the dark... Is the IDE drive's jumper on master? Is it on the end of the cable?
Do you have a DVD drive in your system (IDE?/SATA?)?

You're planning to get a new SATA drive eventually, aren't you? It would be interesting to see if putting that in would cause the same effect... But it would be irrelevant then, since you would install your new system on that, and forget about the 80GB... I'm out of ideas.

 

[alukah]

Sorry for the late response.

Just checked and... the IDE has no jumper. I feel dumb for not checking that first.
I'm gonna get another jumper when I can (probably next week, since most part of this week is part of a holiday)

In case it doesn't work, to answer your other questions, yes it's on the end of the cable, and no I don't have optical drive connected.

 

[szaboaz]

If "no jumper" means "cable select" for your HDD, then setting it to master with a jumper probably won't make any difference. But it won't make things worse either, so it's worth a try. Just be absolutely sure that you put it into the proper position, use the picture on the drive (I know you will, I'm just saying).

 

[alukah]

Hi again.

I went to some stores and asked some friends and I was unable to find a jumper (!)
Are IDE drives really that obsolete?

For the record, yeah "no jumper" should mean "cable select", I was able to use the IDE HDD before buying the SATA one

 

[szaboaz]

I see. I'm out of ideas. I'll just share a story which happened to me (twice, actually).

My Asus A6VM laptop has an IDE drive. When I reinstalled Windows 7, I chose the option to delete all partitions and selected the empty space to install Windows on. The installation finished, but after reboot, the system wouldn't start. Can't even go into BIOS. What have I done!?
As it turns out, something was screwed up around the formatting, so much so, that it hung the POST process. After I took the HDD out and re-formatted it in an USB enclosure, I had no problem with the BIOS recognizing it, and then installing the system.

Strange things happen...

 

[alukah]

Oops, I forgot to "close" this thread, thank you szaboaz for all your help! I'm planning to get another HDD soon so I hope it doesn't give me any problems.

 

[alukah]

Best answer selected by Alukah.

 

[szaboaz]

All right. My magic didn't work here, but hey, SATA drives for the win!
It would be dreamy if you could just go directly from IDE to SATA SSD for system drive. But maybe you're like me: it's still too expensive for the gigabyte.