The amazing disappearing IDE drives...

maxinflixion

maxinflixion

Gawd
Joined
Apr 2, 2007
Messages
625
I have an odd one that is causing some head scratching over here tonight,

I picked up a SATA DVD/RW drive today for my Linux PC as I have two IDE hard drives installed on the one IDE plug.

Simple install right? I plugged her in, and now my IDE drives are no longer recognized in BIOS, which means I don't boot.

Ok, it's something with the SATA drive I suspect, so I remove it from the equation.

Still, no IDE drives in BIOS or otherwise.?.?.?

I disabled SATA in BIOS just for kicks. Nothing.

Removed CMOS battery for a while and loaded Optimized Defaults in BIOS.

Plugged her back in and booted from CD. Worked, but no IDE drives visible.

Anyone have ideas?? My big fix will be to go grab a SATA hard drive tomorrow and re-install OS.

Specs:

ECS GeForce 6100PM-M2 (it's my budget Linux box...)
Athlon 64x2 4000+
2x40gb Mactor IDE Drives
LG Super Multi DVD Drive
7600gs GPU
Antec Earthwatts 500w
 
Yes. And they worked properly just prior. Even more odd is that even after pulling the SATA cables out of the mix (essentially setting it to the last good configuration), the drives aren't showing up.

I resigned myself last night that if I had no solution by morning, I was off to Micro Center to grab a new SATA hard drive, since I am using TWO 40gb Drives, and for $50, I can toss in a 500gb. I'll just have to grab an external drive enclosure to get essential data off the ide drives and reinstall Ubuntu.
 
You can get a USB adapter from newegg for like $20 that does IDE, notebook IDE, and SATA. I use one and it works great.
 
surely you checked the ide cable, it didn't come loose while installing the sata drive

perhaps you could try with 1 ide drive connected at the time
just get into the bios, you'll see the drive or not
then try the other one

If you can't see any of these drive, I would suspect the ide controller has left the building

do you have another machine to connect the drives to, just to see if they are still functional?
 
UPDATE...

Just got back from Micro Center. 1TB drive for $99. Gonna swap it for a 320gb in my XP box once the data copies.

Also grabbed a USB 2.0 enclosure to test out those drives. Not to mention, provided they work, that enclosure will hook directly up to my DVD player which has USB and divx/xvid support.

I am assuming the IDE control is gone as well. Love these ECS boards!

** UPDATE AGAIN**

SATA Hard drive is working fine, although I was wrong, it is only 250gb. Still 3 times as large as what I had and probably much faster.

Next update will be me telling if teh IDE drives remained readable.

***UPDATE AGAIN AGAIN***

IDE Drives are fully readable. Must be a dead IDE controller.

Hell, it gave me a great excuse to pick up one of those 1TB drives and do some data re-arranging.
 
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