Problem with Hitachi Deskstar

[Night]

Hi guys bit of a problem just cropped up and wonder if you can help me out. I was using my computer fine earlier today and then all of a sudden music started to pause and distort.

I thought it was simply my computer was overheating and as such shut it down which went through fine.

When I came back to turn the computer on a fe mins ago I got a no master IDE harddrive detected. So I unplugged the two harddrives I have and the dvd rom drive and installed the hitachi drive which has my xp installation on onto the primary ide channel. I checked and all jumpers were set correctly and rebooted the system.

This time when the computer launched it detected the drive but through up a problem ntldr missing press ctrl-alt-del to restart.

Ive tried reinstalling windows but get a no harddrive detected message any help is much appreciated.

 

[Night]

thanks for the help SiriusB i'll get on to that in the morning. Thing is can I survive the night on an ancient laptop lol.

 

[Night]

Yeh I did a bit of digging that night on my laptop and after some tinkering the next morning. I got the drive working on the ide channel that the dvd drive is on so I either have a duff IDE cable or the silicon image chip on the motherboard is dead. But the drive does work so thankfully havent had to call in the legions of cd's I have stuff stored on.