Hard drive is never detected by BIOS

[steve02a]

I have a single 80GB drive in the computer. It's set to master (CD is unplugged). Computer boots up and memory test is fine. The bios gets to the "detected IDE devices" and just hangs...and hangs...and hangs. After about 5-6 minutes, the bios will finish it's POST and I'll get "boot disk failure insert system disk and press enter" on the screen. Big deal..that doesn't do much for me, since my hard drive is never recognized.

When I get into the bios, and I try to auto-detect the drive, it never finds it. I've tried all combo of the jumper on the drive too (including cable select). If I have the cd-rom plugged...no problem there finding it.

I suspect the hard drive is dead (but it gets power because it's nice and warm). What do you guys think? Bios never sees the hard drive (even after I replaced the IDE cable 3x's)....think the drive is dead?

 

[Electric Ray]

That's one possible reason. Another is that the cable is somehow faulty, or the Motherboard damaged? Is it worth getting a new HD, installing an OS on that, running the suspect drive as a slave, and seeing if BIOS picks it up then? (this may be pointless - i'm new to this lark - but it's what i'd do if i were you).

I found your thread because I have a similar issue, but sounds like mine is more soluble than yours. Rather than hi-jacking your thread I'll post mine on a new thread.

Ray