system does not detect a fixed disk, what to do?

newbie~wan · September 20th, 2004, 09:14 PM

When the computer boots up, it says "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter". No big deal, thats a familiar message. It obviously doesn't think that the hard drive has an OS installed on it (which it does....but anyway).

So I put in the sys recovery disk (its a hewlet packard) and boot from it and it said the recovery was aborted becuse no hard disk was found. The cd-rom has been given the drive letter C, by the way, which I know is not good because the HDD usually gets C. It suggests that I run fdisk. When I run fdsik, it says that it cannot find a fixed drive, which is not surprising by now.

In the BIOS, it detects all the drives just fine. If the BIOS were NOT detecting the HDD, then it would make sense that I get these messages. But since it does seem to be detecting it, and I cant access it with fdisk, I'm not sure what my next move is. Any suggestions appreciated.

John Prophet · September 20th, 2004, 09:19 PM

for the heck of it try the hard drive on the secondary IDE controller

asma1234 · September 20th, 2004, 09:23 PM

no, i know how to fix this, it just happened 2 me today in the morning. Ok so what you have to do is go into the bios, so when the computer is starting, start pressing the key "Del". then it would bring you to the bios. then go to boot, and make the floppy boot, then hard drive and then cd room drive. If that doesnt work then open ur computer case, and check if the harddrive is well plugged. If that doesnt work, try reformating, And if that doesnt work maybe you should want to get a new harddrive

Siliconjunkie · September 20th, 2004, 09:29 PM

First,
Ignore asma. He obviously does not understand. You can't reformat the drive if you can't see it. Don't suggest reformatting so quickly. He may still be able to save his data.

Second,
do what JP said.

Third,
Put the drive in another machine as a slave and see if you can see it.

If all of that fails, you most likely have a dead drive.

Bizkitkid2001 · September 20th, 2004, 10:08 PM

I was getting the same problem with my computer i am assigned too at my college. After 20 minutes of messing around, i switched the drive over too the second IDE controller and everything worked out great.

I think JP hit it on the nail.

newbie~wan · September 23rd, 2004, 07:11 PM

I already tried switching it over to the second IDE controller, it didnt help any. The cdrom drive is on the second IDE and the computer will boot up from the recovery cd, so I think we can safely say both IDE controllers work fine. What should I try next?

newbie~wan · September 25th, 2004, 05:32 PM

When I go into the BIOS, under the "boot sequence" section, it allows you to select not only the order, but the type of device within each type (ex: for a cd-rom, pick a dvd drive or cd drive). The sequence is currently

1. floppy (legacy floppy drive being the type)
2. cd-rom (with pioneer dvd-rom)
3. IDE Hard Drive

Within each drive catagory, there is a list of options, with "Disabled" always being one of them. The problem is, when I select the "IDE", the only options are "none" and "disabled". Its as if the BIOS doesnt know the drive is there. But like I said before, at boot up when the system is detecting primary master, slave, etc, it shows the HDD and the DVD drive as being detected just fine.

WTF is goin on here? Could this be a BIOS virus? A boot sector virus? I don't really know anything about this stuff.

Siliconjunkie · September 26th, 2004, 07:49 PM

I would guess a bad drive. Do you have another machine to put that drive in?

Perhaps flash the bios?

Virus would be about 9 guesses below my last guess. This sounds alot more like hardware.

newbie~wan · September 30th, 2004, 09:05 PM

I found another HDD that was the same make/model. I droped it in the box in place of the HDD in question and it booted up just fine (depite being formatted on a different comp! strange?). So I put the old drive back in and booted up w/ a winXP cd and the install seems to be running fine. It detects the drive, and I can partition and format it. However, when the setup reboots for the first time, the set up doesnt continue. It just starts all over again. If I attempt an install again, it will warn me that the disk already has an OS on it and that I will be overwriting if I continue.

So it seems like the drive kinda works, but it seems that the drive isnt writing properly? I dunno. I'm bout to throw in the towel.