Cannot Detect Harddrive!

Here's a vague question for all u computer geniuses out there:

A friend's computer crashed. he re-booted, and it won't detect a harddrive. is his HDD fried? what are other troubleshooting procedures to find out what's the deal?

I built his computer from scratch, so i feel kinda responsible if anything goes wrong, though that was a year and a half ago. anyway, thanks in advance for any help i can get:smile:

It's probably fried. The only other thing it might be is a loose cable - either the data cable or the power cable, try re-seating the cables, and make sure the jumpers are in place...and you should be able to hear the hard drive "spin up" when you power up the pc.

...but that's the message I always see when a HD dies.

Is the drive seen in the BIOS?? Try another IDE/EIDE cable. Beleive it or not, I've seen my fair share of bad cables.

As penguin mentioned see if it apears in the bios and make sure that the cable is ok. If the HDD is ATA rather than serial make sure that the jumpers are set right. Also try both ide channels just in case one went bad.

Seeing it in the BIOS doesn't necessarily mean it's not fried. In fact most of the fried HDD's I've seen looked good in the bios but were in fact dead.

I understand, and agree that just because a drive shows up in the BIOS, doesnt mean that its good.

Rather than have him rip open the PC right off the bat, a simple BIOS check (did someone accidently remove the drive software wise, change the boot order, and remove the HDD from the boot order, change the HDD to something else) Laugh, but I've seen it happen.

This is just a good starting point for troubleshooting. Asking this question, I'm trying to see if the PC actually sees the drive. If the pc does see the drive, then I'd have him check partitions, boot sectors, probably do a Windows repair. But if the PC doesnt even see the drive, then Windows surely wont. So intead of writing out a list of how to fix several possiblites, I'm just trying to find out what's wrong first...

I've got a similar issue.

My computer runs just fine, but if I plug in this certain HDD, I get that message. Jumpers are correct, yada yada yada. If I set it as slave to my current master, then the system locks up on startup.

Fried HDD?

That'd be my guess. The drive's trashed.

it was free anyway, no loss.

thanks.

sounds like it. is it an hp. that happened to me recently :(