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karasu
11-17-2005, 06:17 PM
what things could cause a computer less than a year old to not be able to detect the primary master or slave drives if nothing was unplugged or changed inside the system. Here's my problem, after rebooting this computer, which was working fine, it could no longer find its hard drives.
stumbles
11-17-2005, 07:04 PM
IDE cable broke or became loose. A power surge or brown out scrambled CMOS settings.
dkeav
11-17-2005, 07:33 PM
ide controller on the mobo crapped out possibly, which would be the sux0r but does happen, do your secondary ide chain devices show up?
soulestream
11-17-2005, 07:37 PM
power supply could be crapping out too


soule
karasu
11-17-2005, 09:53 PM
I tried replacing the cable, since the previous one was a bad fit. Neither device was detected before or after replacing the cable. As for the power suppy, the last one crapped out and was replaced 2 months ago.

The CMOS settings seems likely now that you mention it since the power cable is loosely plugged in to the wall and has been accidentally kicked out a few times. I'm guessing theres nothing I can do if thats that case then?
stumbles
11-17-2005, 10:05 PM
Usually once in BIOS you can press a function key to reset the settings, try that.
karasu
11-17-2005, 11:30 PM
ok, i went to the BIOS and pushed a button that set all the defaults. On the next boot, the master was found but the slave was not, so when I restarted again, it was back to not detecting either.
stumbles
11-18-2005, 12:47 AM
Off hand, sounds like BIOS has gotten severely corrupted. Go to each page in BIOS and press the button/key to set the defaults.
mrrangerman43
11-18-2005, 09:44 AM
Hi

Try plugging in only one hard drive at a time and see if the bios sees them by their self. If you have a spare hard drive, you can unplug both the others and plug in the spare and see if the bios sees the spare. If it sees the spare and or only one of the others I would say it’s a bad hard drive/drives but if the bios doesn’t see any of them I would say it’s the bios, you may be able to do a bios flash and fix it. Or it could just be that the mother board is bad , being new or almost new doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t go bad.

Dan
phlipant
11-18-2005, 11:25 AM
Do not forget to check your fans. You might be overheating.
karasu
11-19-2005, 08:08 PM
Ah, it was a bad hard drive. Thanks for the help. (this post was made from the formally broken computer)
Parcival
11-20-2005, 06:28 AM
Ah, it was a bad hard drive.

In this case, you may find my most recent thread (http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=143255) interesting.