[b]Initialized Hard drive not seen by BIOS[/b]

[Apollo21]

I have a desktop computer w/Two SCSI drives. The secondary drive went bad about a week ago and I now have its replacement in my hand. During that week that it was on its way( Seagate), I had a reoccurring blue Screen episode that would not stop. Most times I could not boot the thing into Windows. Called for help and we ended up just putting down a new instance of Windows XP. This drive was the primary drive that had the operating system on it.

Unfortunately for me the blue screen did not stop, in fact it increased in frequency. I had read somewhere recently that if your dive passes the manufacturers tests (Western Digital for this one) and the blue screen keeps showing up you should initialize the drive. So, I wrote zeros to the entire drive.
Now I am stuck because the BIOS, much less Windows does not recognize either one of the drives. I am guessing that I need to format the primary drive, but to do that I need to have the BIOS recognize it. I have checked the wires and cables multiple times, I have disconnected the 2nd drive just to see if maybe the problems were caused by jumpers being out of place on the 2nd drive. I eliminated that possibility. I am stuck. There is probably a good reason for this but I can not guess what it is. Can someone give me the steps I should go through to get these drives recognized and running?

Thanks for reading this and thanks for your help in advance!

Apollo21

 

[ski]

Was the system built by a major supplier?

 

[Apollo21]

Yes, It was ABS and the Drive is a Westren Digital 74 Gig Raptor that had been working fine up to about 2 months ago. I was getting blue screens every once in a while. I thought putting down a new copy of the OS (XP SP2) would aleviate the problem, but it only made it worse, to the point where it would briefly flicker a blue screen and then go right into reboot mode. Eventually, if I let it so that for a while it would eventually boot into windows. But now after the initialization (Writting zeros to the drive using a utility from WD, the BIOS will not see it. According to my information the drive is a SCSI drive using an SATA interface (Is that possible?). (By the way WD's Utilities had indicated that the drive was ok before the init).

Thanks,
Apollo21

 

[ski]

Connect just the new HD with the cable than came with it, and see if it's seen in BIOS. If it is, then you can use that one as the Primary drive, and rerun the WD diagnostics on the original Primary drive.

 

[Apollo21]

Could the primary be making the secondary disk not to be seen. Because right now I have both of them in there and BIOS is not seeing either one.

I will not be home until 5:00 P.M. this evening, so I can't try anything right away. Do you have any other ideas?

Thank you for responding as you have thus far.

 

[ski]

You're welcome.
Yes, it's possible for a bad drive to affect a good drive.