HD's not reconized, no hardware change - win XP pro

[crash]

Athlon 2100 XP
1 GB Ram
20 GB (originaly from gateway)
80 GB western digital
elitegroup k7sa5 ver 3.1 mobo


Came home one day and the computer had a black screen and was asking
for a bootable device (was running the evening before)
I reset it, it post then only found one CD drive and the floppy drive,
and tried searching for a boot record.

I check the bios settings, they hadn't changed (I have a few things to
check tonite)
At this point i am assuming the HD crashed.

I dropped in the win xp cd and went into recovery mode. With both
drives connected it "swapped" drives. seeing the 80 gig (which is the
slave by cable select) a C: and did not the other. After disconnecting
that one i was able to see the 20 Gig drive (which has the operating
system) and "log" into windows through the Recovery environment
(windows is not booted). I ran chkdsk and it ran through and did say
"there may be one or more errors on this disc" but that is all.

In the reovery i am able to see all the directories but am unable to
get into any of them. I tells me access denied. It does this for both
drives (and my ipod).

Still assuming the HD is bad I left only the 80GIG connected (still as
cable select but in the plug into the correct master ide... I think
this may be an error) I attempted installing win xp on it, it loaded
the setup files then re-booted. after re-booting no HD was detected and
back to square one.

I am going to check all the setting in the bois tonite and possibly
flash it. I also tries a different IDE cable, no change. Any ideas or
suggestions? I think (and hope) the motherboard is toast.

 

[Guest]

Few pcs run on "cable select" mode.Set youre IDE hardware at slave &
master as needed.Also,western digital hds if solo on an IDE cable run without
any jumper pins....

 

[Malke]

Few pcs run on "cable select" mode.Set youre IDE hardware at slave &
master as needed.Also,western digital hds if solo on an IDE cable run
without any jumper pins....

Andrew, you're such an idiot. Wrong, wrong, wrong on all counts.

You can test your hard drives with diagnostic utilities from the drive
mftr.'s website(s). It does sound to me like the problem is on the
motherboard, but you can test this by connecting the drives in another
machine and seeing what happens. You won't be able to boot into Windows on
different hardware, but you'll be able to see what happens in the BIOS, run
a hardware diagnostic, or look at the drive if XP is installed on the
testing machine.

Malke

 

[crash]

Thank you for the relpys. I got it up and running. In my frantic worry
I over looked the CMOS settings. Somehow both the primary master and
slave were set to "not installed". The date and time are still
correct. Strange. It been up and running doing virus scans and degrag.
for about 15 hours now. So i think im in the clear.

 

[Malke]

Thank you for the relpys. I got it up and running. In my frantic worry
I over looked the CMOS settings. Somehow both the primary master and
slave were set to "not installed". The date and time are still
correct. Strange. It been up and running doing virus scans and degrag.
for about 15 hours now. So i think im in the clear.

I'm so glad you got it sorted. Thanks for taking the time to post the
solution.

Malke