Hello

OK, recently reformatted my hard drive using Windows XP, because a previous attempt at converting the drive to NTFS had made it slow. Once reformatted, the drive was much faster. It was working fine for two days, (including turning it on and off a few times) but today, when I turned it on, the BIOS could not detect the hard drive at all. I haven't changed any of the physical settings, messed around with the BIOS or anything like that... but I just can't make the BIOS see my HDD!

Can anyone help? I've tried looking for drivers etc but none of them work unless you're running Windows at the time (I think).

Thanks

What exact message is it giving you? Did you open up the box and check the IDE cable didn't come loose between the board and the hard disk?

Yep, checked all the cables - but they were all in fairly solidly... glued in actually! The message I get when I switch the machine on basically asks for a boot disk, because it cannot find the hard disk to boot from. I've tried a few boot disks but none of them help at all... the Windows XP setup can't find the c:/ drive either.

This doesn't sound good for the hdd. It's possible your drive has been giving you warning signs of an impending failure.

Insure bios is set to auto for ide drives, try a different ide cable, slightly loosen the screws that mount the hdd, remove and reinstall the hdd jumper on the same pins to insure a good connection and pray for a simple solution.

I've checked the connections, and they seem fine. The connections have been fine for over a year now, so it seems too much of a coincidence that this has happened just after I reinstalled Windows again... The BIOS is definitely set for Auto, but if anything, when I reboot, it just takes longer for it to say what I already know... that it can't find my c drive. Argggh

HI
you likely need to goto the hdd manufacture web site and download there hdd test utility.
you need to download it to the comp you now useing and extract the program to a floppy. do not know if the program will make a bootable floppy or not, but i think it will.

I concur, this is what I hoped you weren't going to tell us. When you get that invalid drive message for the hard drive, it very often does mean the disk is dying.

Yanno, HDDs fascinate me. I have two, the oldest is 6 years and the newer one 4 years, and not a drop of trouble ever, not even a bad sector. Yet I read of some which go to disk heaven in a short time. They can be so inconsistent in their durability.

I strongly recommend at this time, if you can get that drive into another machine as a slave and access it, then do so and rescue your personal stuff onto CD/zipdisk/floppy, with such as your address book and anything else with personalised settings or which you cannot replace. No sense hoping we are wrong and risk losing everything.

Thanks for all the advice... unfortunately the floppy didn't work either. I am pretty much resigned to the fact that it's broken, so it's going off to be totally reserviced (warranty, yay). The computer company had no clue either... but did suggest a few things that you guys suggested so it seems like everyone is on the same page. Fortunately, I had backed up the computer only 2 days previously, so it that sense I am very lucky indeed! I guess sometimes, hard drives just go to heaven. Thanks for the help!