PC help forum

[hoyteamx]

My pc decided to switch itself off one day and when I switched it back on it wouldn't recognise the hard disk.

I bougt new hard disk but the PC still won't recognise that there is a hard disk attached!

Does anyone know whats going on? Or can someone point me in the direction of a good pc help forum??

Thanks

[yashiro]

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/

http://forums.hexus.net/

It sounds like a hardware failure but it could be something much less evil.
Your best bet really is to get a PC savvy mate round.

[Sarkster]

It might be a stupid question, but have you gone into the BIOS and told it to auto-detect your HDD?

Sorry, if im teaching you to suck eggs...

[Moodmon]

Keep it simple. Did you check the power and IDE leads are connected? To both the HD and the motherboard? And yes, I know you connected a new one, but maybe the IDE isn't connected to the motherboard. Or the power cable has gone on the blink.

[hoyteamx]

Okay people, first of all, thanks for the help. I spoke to a couple PC savvy mates and they all came to the same conclusion. The HD was knackered. I bought a new one and still no luck. However, I do need to be taught how to suck eggs..!

How do I go into the bios and tell it to auto detect the HD? I don't think this is the probelm because every now and again the PC recognises the HD but windows won't when i try to install it.

Which one's the IDE lead?

[Ciaran]

The IDE cable is the wide, flat, beige one.

What type of PC is it?(Dell or custom)

What make of HDD did you buy?

Did you check the jumper setting on the HDD? They are the little white pieces of plastic on the back of your HDD



It should be set to master. Look on your HDD for which pins they should be set to.

How far can you get in the install of windows?

[hoyteamx]

My pc is a compaq and the HDD is a 10GB Fujitsu model (both of them).

Windows begins preparing on boot up and then after about 20 seconds a blue screen comes up saying that it couldn't detect a HDD.

The IDE cable and the power cable are also connected to the CD drive. I swapped the connections around and the HD still won't work whilst the CD drive always works.

The jumper setting is set to master.

How do you make sure the bios auto detects the HD?

I'm guessing I may need to take it to a pc repair shop but I don't want to get ripped off. Especially if its something I can do myself.

thanks again

[Ciaran]

Since the PC is a compaq the bios should be all setup for you, but it also means that you won't be able to change much in the bios.

Instead of getting ripped off getting an "engineer" to look at it, you should try to get a friend who know about pcs to look at it. I may only be something simple.

[Afterbirth]

1) Do you now have two drives installed?

If so, one must be set to slave of you only have one IDE cable.

2) You normally press DEL to go into the BIOS (or F1 on some machines) just after you've turned it on.

3) Its odd thats only just started to happen but the POST (IE the screen you get before windows boots should tell you if the hard drive is installed (ableit very quickly normally).
If not, Windows may need reinstalling.

4) Whats also odd is that your machine switched itself off, which points to a duff power supply. You could try getting that replaced.

5). A decent forum is here...

http://guru3d.com/

[Mayhem]

ALWAYS try the HD in a different PC to see if it still works. Myself and a couple of other people recently had HD detection problems. However the HDs were fine, turned out the mobo controller was ****ed. Despite the swappage of cables and ports on the board trying to plug it in, the HD wasn't being found. Put it in a new PC, and it was fine...