HDD Unrecognised in BIOS

Voltjunkie · 14 Sep 2011 at 18:34

Hi there.

We have a PC at work that has suddenly decided it doesn't want to play ball. It recently started refusing to boot up saying that no HDD was found so I've had a bit of a play but cannot figure it out.

The HDD is not recognised in the BIOS at all. I have tried switching to a known good SATA cable, a known good SATA port on the motherboard and I have taken the drive home and confirmed it works fine there.

What could be causing the issue? Is it a drive fault or a motherboard fault?

Any help would be much appreciated.

gvm · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:03

Have you checked the SATA speed settings? If the drive is set to a higher speed than the motherboard supports, it won't be seen. Is the "home" motherboard more recent than the "work" motherboard? Of course, something would have had to have changed the settings if it was previously working.

What brand/model of drive is it?

Voltjunkie · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:19

It's a WD Caviar Blue 320GB (WD3200AAJS). I actually used an external SATA to USB device to test the drive at home so I'm not too sure if that makes a difference to your theory.

One thing I forgot to mention was that when the problem first occurred it was sporadic. If it wouldn't find the drive at first, a reboot or two would work. Recently it is never recognised.

gvm · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:24

Voltjunkie said:
One thing I forgot to mention was that when the problem first occurred it was sporadic. If it wouldn't find the drive at first, a reboot or two would work. Recently it is never recognised.

If it was sporadic, then it couldn't realistically be the SATA speed setting - I might believe that somehow it might get changed accidentally once, but not changing back and forth.

Hagar · 15 Sep 2011 at 11:40

Have you tried another HDD on the motherboard?
I would go for a cmos reset on the motherboard and see if that works. There is usually a setting also that introduces a delay for HDD recognition, I do not know your motherboard so cannot confirm that but this may help even if it slows down the boot a little bit.
For the cost of a new HDD which could also be used as extra storage or on another PC it is worthwhile buying one particularly as work tends to be more mission critical than home.

Voltjunkie · 21 Sep 2011 at 21:41

nkata said:
Have you tried another HDD on the motherboard?
I would go for a cmos reset on the motherboard and see if that works. There is usually a setting also that introduces a delay for HDD recognition, I do not know your motherboard so cannot confirm that but this may help even if it slows down the boot a little bit.
For the cost of a new HDD which could also be used as extra storage or on another PC it is worthwhile buying one particularly as work tends to be more mission critical than home.

I don't have a spare hard drive to test the motherboard but I'm putting my money on that being the culprit. Looks like we might as well be purchasing a new tower (this one's rather old and for the cost of a new one the warranty would give them peace of mind).