HD no longer recognized (Mainboard?)

[NCSU98]

My secondary computer is no longer recognizing the hard drive. It boots to a point and says no OS found. The hard drive is also not listed in the BIOS.

I can boot to the hard drive in question in my primary computer which leads me to believe that there is nothing wrong with the HD. My secondary computer will also NOT recognize a known working HD.

A friend told me that it may be the IDE controllers that are bad on the mainboard. I was just about to order a new mainboard when I tested the CD-ROM drives. The BIOS would recognize the CDROM drives and they would even run a bootable Windows CD (but then would tell me there was no HD to be found when it tried to load the OS). I then proceded to try the HD on each channel(?) Primary Master, Primary Slave, Sec. Master and Sec. Slave. Still no luck.

My question is does this still sound like a mainboard problem? Common sense would tell ME that if the IDE recognizes the CDROM drive that it should recognize the HD as well. But, of course, I am a hardware rook and I also know that common sense isn't used very often in the world of computers .

 

[paparazi]

NCSU98
Very likely by the sounds of it but just try a couple more things:
Replace the ultra IDE cable to elliminate that.
Make sure that in the bios both Primary and secondary master/slave are set to "Auto" detect.
Make sure each of the known working hard drives are connected on their own and jumpered as master.
Finally that they have power connected lol.
If you still don't see either of them detected in the bios it's a pretty good bet the motherboard is fried.
Martin



Start by questioning and soon you will be anwering.
So please take but remember to return and give when you can.

 

[micker377]

Start by re-setting the BIOS, and go from there.