BIOS doesn't see hard drive at all

[NuJoizey]

I'm not much of a hardware guy, so i'm hoping you all can shed a little light.

I came in one day and my compaq desktop (which i usually leave on) was hung up on the initialization screen. It does not boot into the operating system. The only thing it allows you to do is go into the bios setup, which I did. When i look under the hardware option, it only recognizes the cdrom and the floppy (an older system). Thinking the hard drive might have gone bad, I swapped out a different one from a different, pc, but no joy. The hard drive was from another later model compaq desktop, but i'm not sure if this would make a difference. At any rate, neither of the hd's were recognized by the bios as even being there.

Question - is it possible that something fried on the motherboard - is this fixable? I'm not sure what else I could do to diagnose the problem as being hd, software or motherboard related. The data on the system is not critical, but I was using this machine as my test environment for various projects.

 

[wahnula]

Is the HDD SATA or IDE? What do you see in Device Manager under IDE controller or SCSI/SATA controller?

Start> Run ' devmgmt.msc ' without quotes. Expand the controller and look for yellow ???s

Have you changed the SATA/IDE cable? Tried another port?


Tony

 

[NuJoizey]

it's IDE , and I can't see anything in device mgr at all - can't boot, or run anything. havn't changed the ribbon cable. I'll try that.

 

[firewolfrl]

Compaq desktops are notorious for not providing enough cooling for the hard drives.
I am betting that the drive was too hot and something burned out in the drive.
if you need the data off the drive you may have to send it to a lab

 

[wolluf]

Try it on the other controller (that your optical drive's on).

 

[NuJoizey]

don't need the data, i'm just trying to figure out if it's the hard drive itself, or something that fried on the motherboard, and no other hard drive at all will work on it. I guess one crux of my question is, can you just unplug one hard drive from one machine, stick it in another and expect that it will boot? I suspect the answer is no, but there must be a way to configure my extra hard drive to boot in this new machine, but I can't get the rest of the system to recognize there is a hard drive in place.

 

[wolluf]

NuJoizey - if bios is not recognising ANY hard drive connected to primary IDE controller, it suggests something wrong with controller (or cable - but you said you were going to try another). Which is why I suggested connecting hard drive to secondary IDE (where optical drive is now) - to see if its recognised.

As to moving drives between machines - if the motherboards are similar (chipsets), then good chance of it booting in new machine. Otherwise, probably not - and would need a repair reinstall to work. However, as you no doubt as aware, if the machine is not seeing the drive, it won't even be able to try to boot!

 

[DataRec]

This is actually a common failure for drives. When the drive dies the BIOS won't see it. In some cases it may be recognized by the BIOS but improperly. In most cases, firmware corruption causes the issue. The only way to deal with it is to use a product like PC-3000 to diagnose it properly.

 

[cjcoyle]

I don't think it's the HDD. Follow what wolluf is saying and connect the drive to the CDROMs ribbon cable (pull it off the cdrom and plug it into the hdd, making sure the red stripe along one side of the cable is closest to the power connection to the hdd. Also try using the power connection from the CDROM, although rare it's possible one of the pins on the HDD power connector is bad. Good luck!

-Chris

 

[edfair]

You also need to look in CMOS setup to make sure the primary IDE is not disabled. Unlikely , but possible.
If the drive is identified by the BIOS when the secondary master is set auto it indicates a problem on the primary IDE channel. This is part of a VLSI chip on the M/B and theoretically could be replaced but it will be sole source Compaq and they probably don't have any for sale, only for internal use.
Your alternate resolution is to buy an expansion card controller and use it to replace the integrated set.


Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.