Computer help...
 

Ok, now I'm stumped.

It was working fine, but I decided that I wanted to reboot just because I felt it was necessary. So I did. Took an abnormally longer amount of time to power down, but when it came back up, primary 0 and primary 1 not found.

Umm, bad. So, I played around, unslaved drives, swapped cables, changed power supplies, reset the bios, nothing. Both hard drives are running and have power. You can feel them. Think the primary EIDE slot in my mobo died out? All of a sudden?

That is a possibilty. What was the last thing you did before rebooting the machine though?

Also, if it's a desktop and not a laptop, check to make sure that all your cards are seated in the slots. Yes I know, you are probably thinking, "It was working fine so how would they have moved" Well just humor be DAMNIT, after all YOU asked for help lol. (ok that almost sounded angry haha)

You said you swapped cables and whatnot. Try just connecting 1 drive at a time, and see if either come up when plugged in by themselves. Try each one.

Dust.

agreed I've had a slot just die on me before it blows. Also a nice can of air and reconnecting just one drive boot up if it dont work then theres ur issue but if it boots up ur one drive maybe causing the other one to not read some how. Stupid computers

Yeah, I tried seating the cards again, and I tried booting 1 drive at a time with both cables. Only one of them has windows installed, the other is a storage...and come to think of it, I don't know if I use it.

I closed all my programs out and just shut down. Maybe I'll try running it in cable select and see if it sees them. Or, I'll see if I can change the boot config for secondary instead of primary, move my CD drives to primary and the HDD's to secondary and see if it picks em up. Could be a bad PSU, now that I think about it, not letting them spool up fast enough...

Bah, I'll let you know what I find. Thanks everyone for your help thus far!

Bios knows there's drives connected. I swapped them to seconday and primary, single and together, cable select, master, slave...nothing worked. The bios has them as "Unknown Device".

what mobo are you using...also try booting up with each hard drive separately. ive had the same problem with my mobo when trying to boot up sata and ide using the sata as a slave.otherwise it could be a software issue...i agree however...dust can be an issue as well but doubtful. after making sure things are seated and neither of them boot up properly grab a windows live boot cd or an ubuntu live cd and grab an external and back up all the crap you absolutely need then kill disk it. after that reformat completely....ive had this sort of thing happen on my laptop and its a pain in the ass

oh yeah...before you do what i just said....check in the bios and make sure SATA isn't enabled if you're using IDE. lol ive made that mistake before.

Not the PSU.

What the ****. Did I lose 2 ****ing drives at the same time?

I'll do all that later tonight or something. But yeah, SATA is off.

I ****in hate old computers...and I don't know what mobo it is. I'd imagine Foxconn, but the system is a dell 8300. I was going to swap the whole thing into another case, but it's designed strictly for this case. Retarded. I hate dell.

LMAO. Dude, its not software related if his computer won't even boot or detect his hard drives.

99SL2, you are doing the right thing by taking each step at a time to figure out whats wrong. Since you've now tried everything stated, I would say before blaming the motherboard, by a hard drive from best buy or whatever, or I have extras, (small ones for testing) and hook it up. If it still doesn't recognize the drive, then yes your motherboard is definitly shot.

Your mobo or RAM is fried.

um..yea it could...the OS or bootloader could be fugged up hence the reason why they're not reading it. same thing happened with my laptop...the screen wouldn't even turn on (and yes the screen was fine) i had to do what i told him to do to actually get it to work.

You couldn't be more wrong if someone paid you to be. I do this for a living all day every day.
He can stick a BLANK BRAND NEW OUTTA BOX hard drive in there, and if its telling him that Primary 0 or 1 is NOT DETECTED or his bios is saying "unknown" it's IN NO WAY a software issue.

POST comes before bootloaders there buddy. Do you know what POST means? Power On Self Test. So BEFORE anything tries to read the software or MBR (Master Boot Record) of the hard drive, the system checks to make sure everything is working. In this case, something isn't.

You=fail. :wink:

hmm i really could've sworn it could've been caused by a software issue...thanks for enlightening me though. I did just graduate for computer networking and security but i don't know it all yet and i appreciate you telling me where i was wrong. i'm actually going to read further on that to make sure i dont make the mistake next time.

Hmm I think I sense sarcasim. Its ok though. I know I'm a dick about things some times.
But seriously, if indeed you did graduate for Networking and Security, thats great, and thats a very good thing to know, but that's really not related to hardware issues and break/fix scenarios like this one as much as it is software and well, network related.
Honestly, you should look up more on the topic. 99's bios is saying unknown to his drives. And like I stated, if its a problem with his motherboard, then even a brand new drive still blank, will do the same thing.

And let me clairify something, you are correct in your thinking, you are just applying it wrong here. A software problem CAN stop the computer from FULLY booting, but only AFTER it completes POST, and tries to load from the MBR. If the computer is locking up or giving errors while POST, then its a hardware related problem, like in this case.

i wasn't sarcastic at all, to be completely honest. i am pretty good with constructive criticism.

in the school we went over a+ hardware and software through all the os's then onto networking and security..however i didn't have many break/fix labs so im not overtly skilled in it (this is where experience plays a part lol)

im actually going to be going through my a+ books to brush up on as much as i can since after trying what i thought would be right i was proven wrong lol so i need to study to be able to know what im talking about and start working with the stuff. if you're ever able to help me i'd more than welcome it. :)

It's no problem. Like I said, I've been known to sound like dick on here lol, and well, I guess I am lots of times ha.

But seriously, I'm always more then willing to help someone who wants to know more about it. Any time, just let me know. You can ask me questions or whatever you want. I don't have all the answers lol, but I'll do my best.

You are 100% right about experience. Honestly, I learned more in 3 months when I started working for a local PC shop owned and run by one guy, and myself, then I did the whole year that I took the A+ class. Nothing is ever like the book says.
Hell, I had one PC where the guy put vaseline...yes petroleum jelly onto a processor (instead of heatsink paste) and brought it in and wondered why the system fried lol. I pulled it apart and saw about 1/4 of vaseline on it. I took pictures lol.

If you've got a spare one, let me know. A spare PSU too, mayhaps, just for a quick power up to see if my PSU is dying out from being on all the time. Might not be spoolin the bitches.

I heard through this thread a rumor on RAM being a possibility. That high or low probability for this issue? It's reading it all in the BIOS, so I'm going to guess a low probability.

I just think it's kinda wierd to lose 2 HDD's in a split second without a power surge. =/

Oh! When I swapped the HDD's and CD drives from primary/secondary, the CD drives still read. I think I forgot to mention that. So it's not the slot, unless it's not picking up the HDD info for whatever stupid reason.

Well since you live in Levittown, you are very close to me. If you'd like we can arrange a time and you can bring it by and I can take a look at it for you.