PC is not recognizing my hard disks. What to do?

Jubei · Post by **Jubei** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 7:23 am

Major PC disaster encountered last night!

As I was surfing the web and listening to music with foobar in the background, and when I launched Excel, my PC suddenly froze and crashed - I got a blue screen of death - and on re-start, bios says I have no hard disk installed!! (I have 2 internal WD hard disks)

I tried swapping new SATA cables as well as using a different power rail. The problem did not go away. Today, I bought a new Seagate hard disk, installed it but bios still does not recognize it. When I put my hand on the hard disk, I think I feel them vibrating just a little, so I think the hard disks are at least spinning.

My guess is that the SATA controller has died on me. Any ideas on how I can know for sure what the problem is? And if it is the SATA controller's problem, does this mean time for a new board (thus new system as I am still on socket 939)?

thejamppa · Post by **thejamppa** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 7:30 am

Have you tried to reset bios either by clearing CMOS with jumper or removing battery for 10 seconds? If that doesn't help, you could always check near the battery if you can see meltdown on board near south bridge where sata controller lies.

Jubei · Post by **Jubei** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 7:49 am

Pardon my ignorance, but how does resetting bios help?

When I go into bios setup it recognizes everything else apart from what's connected to the SATA ports - which include 3 hard disks (there are 4 SATA ports). It seems to me that everything else is fine.

psiu · Post by **psiu** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 11:03 am

Jubei wrote:Pardon my ignorance, but how does resetting bios help?

When I go into bios setup it recognizes everything else apart from what's connected to the SATA ports - which include 3 hard disks (there are 4 SATA ports). It seems to me that everything else is fine.

It *might* help, it's an easy and quick first step, and the black magic voodoo of the BIOS gods should never be trusted. Or something.

Oh, and you could pick up a SATA controller card...though I dunno if your Windows install would like that very much.

Jubei · Post by **Jubei** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 8:16 pm

This morning I just tried :

1) Using Asus support CD to flash bios
2) reset cmos by taking out battery and moving jumpers

Neither helped the situation. I am now convinced my motherboard SATA controller is fried. Thanks for all the help guys!

Now is it probably time to do abit of research and come back to see if you folks have some comments on the components I would like on new build!

Jubei · Post by **Jubei** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 5:10 am

Just got my hands on a SATA-to-IDE connector and plugging the hard disks into the IDE port, the motherboard / bios successfully recognized the hard disks.

The problem now is that the C drive is connected to the secondary IDE port and the mobo still won't load the OS.

I was hoping that it would boot into Windows. Can I tweak bios to get it to boot in Win XP or what can I do?

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Sun Mar 02, 2008 5:21 am

Hello,

I think that you will have to do an upgrade installation of Windows, and install the new SATA drivers from a floppy -- when it says to hit F6 to install SCSI driver.