Windows 7: Hard drive issues

Hello all,

I am having major problems with my pc.

I went to turn my pc on yesterday, and found i had a missing driver that is needed for windows to boot from dos. I repaired it by using the windows disk, rebooted my pc and now my hard drive has disapeared.

What i have done to troubleshoot is,

Changed sata header, changed sata cable.

My other hard drive shows up no problem and my DVD/RW

When i went to run the error test it kept saying i had no Western Digital Drive, i rebooted 3 to 4 times and it then found the hard drive, ran the Western Digital lifespan test and had no errors at all. rebooted my pc and it booted into windows.

Shutdown the pc to reboot and it had disapeared again.

Also, when the BIOS goes through its checks, where it does the memory test and showing the BIOS details, yarder yarder yarder, it stops and says 'detecting IDE dirve'. Well i don't use IDE anymore so this option is turned off in BIOS. it was even doing this when it did get to boot to windows.

This is very annoying as i think i may need a new motherboard, but does anyone got any ideas whats going on or what i can do.

Hello LuckyStar, reseat the SATA cable of the hard drive and then remove the CMOS battery and put it back in. Then enter BIOS and let WD hard drive be at the 1st boot device. Reboot the pc.

Hi Dinesh,

I have re-flashed the BIOS and reset the CMOS, i reflashed to an earlier then to a later version. i have reseated the hard drive as i thought it might have been a header issue.

It just will not find it, and where it should be in BIOS is a blank space, where as if there were not a drive it would state it empty (not sure on exaclt what it says), so it knows its there but it will not fully find it to boot, hard to explain really.

Hi Luckystar,

Since your other HDD shows up, how about seeing whether your problematic HDD is detectable if connected to that port instead.

Tried that. I seriously think this is a motherboard problem. something i did'nt want as this means i will now have to upgrade to an i7 940.

"Oh mr bank manager"

Thanks for your help. guys

Motherboard problem - perhaps, but not without redress.

In BIOS, disable support for mobo resources that you do not use - serial port, reserve IRQ for VGA, et cetera.

Don't have much in the way of resources as the board does not have anything in the of intergrated stuff. apart from RAID (which is turned off as i don't have that sort of setup, i back everything up manually) Everything just has speed settings.

This is the first time this has happened and it all started when i installed Kaspersky IS 2009, i had the trial version before and had the same issue with a driver disapearing but i had it all sorted last time.

Do you have another HDD you can try to confirm whether it's the board or the HDD?

Yes, i have a backup hard drive and a DVD-RW and they are both SATA.

The hard drive does work as it did find once last night. But then it disapeared again.

I think you have a harddrive with an intermittent problem somewhere in its circuit board, or a flaky power connection. When you changed SATA cables did you also try different power connection, or just the data?