Vanishing Hard Drives! Help!

[DrPanic]

Here's the scenario.

I just bought an new WD 100GB HD to add to my system which was already composed of one WD 100GB HD and one WD 60 GB HD. All drives are EIDE.

Eveything was fine, I installed the new WD drive on the secondary IDE (disconnected CD-RW and DVD drives). Windows XP booted up fine and recognized the drive. I think copied over files from the 60 GB drive to the new 100 GB drive. (Old 100 GB drive is boot disk.) Then I yanked out the 60 GB drive and installed the two 100 GB drives on IDE #1, reconnected the CD-RW and DVD drives to IDE #2, and rebooted.

Poof. None of my drives are recognized by the BIOS anymore.

Before you ask:
YES I have an up-to-date BIOS
YES I had the Jumpers on the drives set correctly.
YES I have a CSEL cable that I know works.
YES I tried various cables and jumper configurations.
YES I've tried both 100 GB and the 60 GB drives in another machine, and NONE are recognized by the BIOS.

System:
Windows XP/Home
p4 1.7 Ghz
Abit TH7II-RAID
GeForce 2 GTE 64 MB
Soundblaster Audigy

PS - The second machine that I tried the drives in is a Windows 98 machine with Maxtor drives and an ASUS mobo with up to date bios.

Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[chaps]

Put your second 100GB-harddrive back on IDE 2 as master. Jumper the DVD ROM and CDRW drives as slave put them on IDE 1&2- see you can see the drives now.

MLC

 

[anim]

I am having a problem where the BIOS IS seeing my slave hard drive (Seagate ST380021A), but I do not have access to it (not seen in Explorer). I am running Win XP pro. Disk Management sees it, but it no longer has a Volume ID. It is no longer typed as having an NTFS file system, and from the looks of things, my 30 GB of data is gone as it is saying that I have 100% free space. It is calling both my boot HD and this one primary partitions.

I was given the option a few boots ago to change the HD to a dynamic disk, but didn't as this once happened previously and I did loose all data.

Any thoughts on how to get things back, or what's happening?

 

[DrPanic]

Hmm... Unfortunately, I've discovered the problem. NONE of the four drives are spinning. Seems they've all be toasted. I wonder if I had a power surge or something. Thank god they're still on warranty.

 

[wuhair]

Basically the same thing happened to me, but my drives still spin. i wonder what really happened. see my post.

 

[Jontmke]

DrPanic- If none of your drives are spinning that would seem to be a power issue. The likely hood of 4 drives frying at the same time must be astronomical.

 

[GrandpaCarl]

hi DR PANIC,

I would suspect a killed power supply before suspecting that you killed all of the drives. If you have a voltmeter, check both the 5 and 12 V outputs going to the drives. You may have overloaded the poor power supply. One thing is for certain: No Spin = No Work!

Grandpa Carl

 

[DrPanic]

Yeah I wish that were the case... but the power supply works fine for other components (I tested some connectors to CD and DVD drive - no problem). And the damaged drives aren't recognize and don't spin up on a completely different system.