Help! Mobo stopped recognising ANY drives.

Psamiad · 27 Nov 2011 at 18:04

Hello all,

I wonder if anyone can shed any light on this problem. I recently built a media PC to sit under the TV, and it's been working well for several months. Today however, it froze completely. Upon restarting, no drives at all were recognised in boot up, and gives the error message: DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.

Going into BIOS, the drives are not recognised there either. It's as if they aren't even plugged in, it just says [none] next to ide channel slave, master etc etc.

The drives do power up - the dvd lights up, and the tray is openable, the HDD spins up. During post, the hard drive light comes on, and stays on and there is a long pause while it tries and fails to detect any of the drives.

I have tried: resetting CMOS (properly with a battery pull), loading fail-safe defaults, loading optimized defaults, switching SATA cables around, trying one drive only, swapping SATA sockets, trying DIFFERENT drives from another PC (doesn't recognise them either), getting power from a seperate power source, and pretty much any CMOS setting I could change.

It seems to me that something in the mobo is borked, but am surprised that it still boots up to post. Is it possible that something so specific such as a SATA controller (or whatever it is) could cause this problem?

My conclusion is that the mobo is the source of the problem. If you agree, is the only solution to replace?

Thanks in advance.

My machine: mobo: Gigabyte GA-G41MT-S2P, CPU q6600, 4gb RAM, vertex 2 40gb, 2tb samsung sata drive, LG blu-ray sata drive, ati hd6570, compro videomate t220 tv card.

jpod · 27 Nov 2011 at 21:40

Not sure, there is an article here, have you read through this?

Can you plug a pc speaker in and diagnose the bleeps?

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18281472

pod

Psamiad · 27 Nov 2011 at 21:52

No, I guess I wasn't clear. The PC boots up fine, no beeps, posts, just gets stuck looking for drives. It just refuses to see that there are drives (hard drive, solid state drive and dvd drive) at all, and therefore cannot start booting windows.

Psamiad · 28 Nov 2011 at 12:44

Well I've decided to go ahead and order a new mobo, hopefully will sort the problem. What a pain!

Deception · 28 Nov 2011 at 12:45

Do you have any usb devices plugged in to the PC at all? I had a fan that if plugged in the PC, it would refuse to boot and stuck on POST.

Psamiad · 28 Nov 2011 at 12:58

I do, yes. Keyboard, wireless dongle and Xbox controller. I will try unplugging them when I get home.

Psamiad · 2 Dec 2011 at 16:17

Update: I have replaced the motherboard, and discovered something quite curious. The Vertex 2 is completely unrecognised by the BIOS. The other drives, howver, are back. Very very strange.

The bottom line is: my Vertex 2 50gb has completely died. A little research reveals this to be a common problem, especially if you put your PC to "sleep" a lot (which I do, as it's a media PC). A real shame, I thought all the bad press about OCZ drives was exagerated, but now it seems it's happened to me! The only fix it seems, is to replace it completely - which I will, but not an OCZ drive. Any suggestions?

The curious thing is, I can't explain why the old mobo stopped recognising ANY drives at all. If I get around to it, I will test it again, and see if this still is the case.

Edit: I suspect the BIOS got fixated looking for the Vertex and then stopped looking for any further drives afterwards? I don't know enough the inner workings of BIOS to know.