advice on hard drive detection problem

a few months back my computer was working fine but one day it suddenly rebooted with a disk boot failure message.

when this happened both my OS drive and my data drive were not found by bios.
so both appeared to fail at the same time.

when i tested the drives on another person's PC both drives were found by BIOS no problems and my OS drive even booted and shutdown fine.

i narrowed it down to 4 possibilities from my knowledge

1. bad SATA cables
2. bad power supply
3. bad SATA controller/ports
4. the drives being detected on the second PC was a total fluke and the drives are bad

i bought a new power supply and SATA cables and the BIOS still doesn't find my drives.



so i am thinking the SATA controller/ports is the issue and i am thinking about getting a new motherboard but i want to make sure that i am not missing some else.



also my IDE dvd drives seem to work fine just the SATA is the problem.


does any one have any advice or feedback on this issue such as other potential problem sources i didn't think of etc.


all feedback appreciated.

i followed the clear CMOS procedure with and without removing the battery and in either case the drives were still not detected.

thanks for that idea TVeblen because i didn't think of it.

i also doubled check my power requirements and i required just under 500W and my new Power supply is 550W so i should have plenty of power.

thanks for the advice.

yeah a SATA to IDE would just make the drive slower even if it worked. so that is not even worth the money like you said.

i tried stripping it down to essentials components only once before but it never hurts to try again.

as for a secondary controller no it only has two SATA 1 ports what the controller is i can't say as i never had any SATA drivers available even when i used XP. in addition HP doesn't provide anything either.

i have been looking for a different motherboard for quite some time but socket 939 parts are hard to come by.

the board only has 1 PCI express x16 slot (video card) and the rest are standard PCI. and i know putting a SATA card on the PCI bus is really going to affect the speed so that is not worth the money.

i guess the SATA ports failing is no surprise considering the age of my PC.

getting the new motherboard would help since it supports SATA 2.

i am just praying that i don't waste money getting the new MB and the drives still turn out to be bad. despite that i think it is extremely unlikely since they worked just fine on a different PC.

i will try stripping it to essentials when i get home.

and thanks for your advice on the matter.

i just got the adapter today and my drives are working!
so that means its the motherboard without a doubt.

thanks for your help on this problem.

the motherboard going bad is kind of a good thing since i wanted a new one and the current one had other weird problems as well.

later