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General discussion

Bios not detecting Hard drives, what could be the problem?

by masterying01 Mar 3, 2006 8:10PM PST

Mobo: Asus p4c800 e delux
CPU: 3.2ghz p4 512kb l2 cache
Hard Drive: 2 x 120gb Western Digital 7200rpm Sata
Ram: Corsair 2x 512mb pc3200
Power Supply: Antec 500W
Graphics: ATI 9600xt

heres the story, my mobo fried and i had to rma it through asus. everything around the CPU socket stopped working. they sent me a new one. now when i try to boot up the computer with the new mobo, it is unable to detect both of my SATA harddrives which are hooked up correctly. it says "Not Detected" in the bios, therefore the computer will not boot. the harddrives are not on RAID 0 so no drivers should be needed.

i know for sure my Power supply is fine, and i'm guessing the mobo and cpu should be fine too. i also have 2 internal dvd burners hooked up. jumpers on the HD and optical drives have not been touch since the last time the comp was working. the wierd thing is....the new mobo that asus sent me was missing the jumper that flashes the mobo. i had to dig through my parts box to find a jumper.

possibility for the problem: bad harddrives? (shouldnt that bring me to the blue screen of death instead of saying "not detected") bad sata cable? (i dont have any spares around so i can't test it) bad mobo? (i'm assuming asus sent me a working mobo).

thats the only thing i can think of. i am no expert, but i do know my way for the most part around a computer. does anyone have any input on what the problem is? or any advice on how to fix it? thank you.

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

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Might be dead

by joesmithers06 Mar 3, 2006 9:38PM PST

If a bunch of things fried on your old motherboard, it's possible a power surge went up into the hard drives and fried them as well. The only time you'd get a blue screen, is if Windows had started booting and ran into some critical failure.

It's also possible the cables have gone bad, or even that you got a defective replacement board. It's unlikely it was tested before being sent to you. They probably just grabbed one off a stack and shipped it off to you.

Can't really tell for sure without either another drive or another SATA cable to do some tests.

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SATA BIOS settings

by billzhills Mar 3, 2006 9:57PM PST

Pull out the manual and look for the PATA/SATA settings.

You will have to make the SATA drives active and as first boot device. Cannot guide you as each board is different. The Gigabyte boards I use have a default setting of Auto for SATA drives which equals ''Detect as IDE''. Meaning in post boot the drives are not their.

Luck

Bill

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