Hi guys - signing on from my old laptop and dialup. I have a big problem with my PC. Recentky I have been getting erratic 'hard drive not found' errors from BIOS. Occasionally it simply cured itself. Now I have the problem on both of my hard drives and my PC will not boot. Both drives are now showing as 'not found' I can access my CD/DVD but wont go any further. Both of the drives are Barracuda's bought at diferent times... I cant for the life imagine they have both gone down, more a problem with the IDE line, hence motherboard problem (ASRock).

If any of you guys have any clues... I'd be forever in your debt! Sounds like a new board/chip to me (which sounds like an ideal opportunity) but I dont wanna go stripping down uneccesarily. The board/chip I have are only 18months old... the drives have a 3 year guarantee - which covers them until 2007...

Idea's please?

Interesting, if very frustrating problem.

I would first pull the side off the pc and check connections etc.

Are the drives set up as normal, and not as RAID or anything fancy?

Check the bios settings for the drives. And see if they are picked up in there. If not, then you are probably in big trouble. (Either a HDD or MB fault probably. Always try a different set of leads on the drives first though (if you have a couple of spares anyway).

Usually things that kill HDDs are shocks when they are in use (like someone kicking the PC). Other than that if they are new, i doubt they should have died.

David

Is it a Seagate jobbie?? if so go to their online help centre, you can check it's warranty and even down load hard drive check tools, mine was out of waranty and dead as a door nail but you could be lucky !!

Jason

Ok so far so good.

I've already checked the BIOS - my C and D drives are not recognised.

I have exchanged the cable... no progress

no-one has kicked the drives as they are pretty out of the way.

It's an amazing coincidence if two drives of unequal age were to go down within 1 week of each other? I still am lead to believe it's a MB problem.

Yes, it does sound like a MB problem. Do you have a spare one that you can use or can you borrow one from someone else? Or even the use of an old PC would be enough. Just something to plug your HDDs into to check them.

It would be very strange for them both to have died within a week of each other.

Did you notice any errors or anything leading upto the time it stopped working? Read errors, boot failures etc? Trouble copying or moving files, or lots of program errors?

David

As stated my C drive (primary) has always been ok... until now. The D drive (secondary) has had an intermittent fault for a week or so. Sometimes picking it up, sometimes not. No other PC other than a laptop... I have a friendly PC spares supplier where I get most of my parts. He is very knowledgeable... he will check it out tomorrow (I hope!) thanks for your help(s) () I'll let you know.

Are they both IDE and on IDE0 and have you tried them separately. Are they on an 80 wire cable and is the cable blue end plugged into the board? If it's been working and conked and they're not detecting in bios I think you may be up the proverbial creek. Asrock boards are the lower end and don't get rave reviews from many builders. I have an old system I plug HDD's into as slaves to see if they detect and have resurrected a few using the manufacturers diagnostics available free from their website. The Seatools one is brilliant.

If you do end up buying a new MB i would strongly recommend Gigabyte (huge name). Built several PC's with those, and never had any trouble. Easy to set up as well, and give good performance. Other manuf' to consider is Asus. Also very good.

David

I had Giga prior to this one... the ASRock I have got a good review at the time

I think for the hammer I give them... switched on for 90% of the time. Extensive use of video audio editing I should be pushing the boat out a bit more than I can honestly afford. I guess I'll have to cut my cloth as usual! I'd like a 64bit cutting edge thing but I dont hink the missus would aprove, we'll see what's available.

I've built 2 cheap asrock systems with built in graphics and neither of these will run a slave off IDE0. They both gave the error message mentioned. They were o.k. as they were only for a mate who wants to do a bit of surfing and copying. One is a 1900+XP with dvd and a rewriter on IDE1 and the other is a Duron with a cd and rewriter. I've used Asus, Aopen, Gigabyte and PCchips boards without problems and find the higher end boards are better supported with driver and bios updates.

Right - I've managed to bottom the problem with my PC... basically a PSU spike (14.3V) has taken out my Motherboard and both drives. I've now replaced them. I have now got a 64bit ASUS with 3.2Ghz chip, two new drives giving me 220Gb. It's currently formatting the drives and then all I have to do is install all of my software all over again.

Funny you should say a spike as that was going to be one of my suggestions...Was it an old PSU? Plugged into a surge protector?

You should have a nice speedy PC there, not much software out to make use of the 64bit hardware yet tho....

I got a new Maxtor 200Gb HDD the other month for £65. Storage is cheap...

Hope you get it all up and running again ok.

David

Flak - having looked at the PSU I had, I'm ashamed to admit that it was absolutely full of dust! it's the only part of my PC I never cleaned regularly... in future it will be! Needless to say I've lost bucket loads of information... which I had not backed up. How can you get that much information onto even a DVD now? I know i should do it (blah. blah, blah) i just didn;t think BOTH drives would go down on me Ho hum...

I see an increasing number of PSU faults --- can be a swine to track down (I really should invest in a PS2 power suplly tester) it always doses more damage.
The initial cause of the surge could have been a faulty main power lead causing arcing at the PSU socket end.

Other increasing fault I see is 80 wire ribbon cables going iffy -- they aren't as robust as the older 40 wire type.