My computer-box done broke!

March 5, 2006 10:31 AM

My desktop PC, which has been working happily for a year, has suddenly refused to boot - I get prompted to insert boot media. The two SATA hard drives aren't detected in the BIOS (as they used to be). What should I do to work out the problem and fix it?

I'm fairly techy, but more of a software guy, and this is the first computer I've built, so I'm not really sure what to do. I don't think the two hard drives have both failed at the same time - that would be pretty unlikely, and I haven't seen the intermittent errors that tend to foreshadow a drive failure. (Does this mean that I'm looking at a motherboard failure?)

I think I've checked all of the connections between the power supply, motherboard and drives. I don' t have another desktop that I can put the drives into to see if they're still alive. What next?

Details of the system:
AMD64 processor,
ASUS K8V motherboard,
1 80Gb SATA HD,
1 200Gb SATA HD (not in a RAID array)
WinXP SP2

posted by wilberforce to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

This could be something as simple as having the machine's boot selection order set with CD drive ahead of hard drives, and having a music CD in the drive. But that's pretty simple to check, and change if needed.

Assuming that the BIOS settings are for the machine to boot first from the hard drive, it sounds like your hard drives aren't detectable. Could be something as simple as a corrupted Master Boot Record (MBR). Assuming you can boot from a LiveCD, you might be able to poke around and learn something about the problem, if you can see your drive(s) while booted from the LiveCD.
posted by paulsc at 10:53 AM on March 5, 2006

Response by poster: A LiveCD's a good idea, thanks - I'll grab an Ubuntu one to try that.
posted by wilberforce at 11:02 AM on March 5, 2006

...could also be a bad sata controller - add a sata addon card if the livecd doesn't pick it up...
posted by disclaimer at 11:17 AM on March 5, 2006

Check the cables inside the case haven't come loose?
posted by Orange Goblin at 11:27 AM on March 5, 2006

Um, let me clarify what I said:

It's pretty odd that both of your sata drives have dropped out of the bios - if the mbr was bad on one, the other would still show up. Either they're disabled there or the SATA interface is broken somehow.

Alternately, check the power supply again - swap the power connectors with the CD drive, etc to see if the tray opens, etc.

If your liveCD doesn't pick up the SATA drives, then go get a PCI sata add-on card and plug your drives into it. Boot the machine and see if it sees the drives there. If it doesn't see it, take the drives to another sata machine (a local shop, maybe) and see if they're alive.
posted by disclaimer at 11:30 AM on March 5, 2006

well you know its probably a single chip that has both SATA interfaces on it so if that chip died it wouldnt be so far fetched for both SATA interfaces to go...
posted by joeblough at 11:36 AM on March 5, 2006

For all hardware failures, step one is always, always, always, check the cables. Even if you just did, even if you know they're fine.

But assuming you've done that, then as everyone's mentioned, it's quite probably a sata controller issue, or the bios being flaky. This can happen with cheap motherboards -- which are seductive but often screw you over in the long run.
posted by blacklite at 12:02 PM on March 5, 2006

Go through your BIOS settings. There may be an option there to enable PATA, SATA, or both. If your CMOS memory got reset somehow, it may have defaulted to only enabling PATA.
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim at 12:36 PM on March 5, 2006

Oooh, the NForce chipset doesn't like some models of hard drives. They wouldn't by chance be Maxtors, would they?
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:16 PM on March 5, 2006

Actually, looks like that's a VIA chipset, not nforce. I'd reset the CMOS (usually a jumper onboard), then load the optimized defaults on reboot.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:18 PM on March 5, 2006

You don't need a Linux CD. If you have a bootable Windows XP then boot into the "Recovery Console". Type this:

FIXMBR

See what that does...
posted by meehawl at 2:25 PM on March 5, 2006

There's nothing connected to the USB sockets is there? My machine does this all the time when I try and boot with a pen drive left in (but then I am a plonker).
posted by grahamwell at 2:59 PM on March 5, 2006

Another suggestion to triple-check the SATA csbles, particularly if you were fooling around inside the case. Many of them, mostly the first ones, were very flaky.

If you have four ports on your motherboard, you might try using the other two, just to see what happens.

Also, on some motherboards I've seen, there is a 'compatibility setting' for SATA that makes it look like regular IDE drives. This lets you install XP without needing a driver disk. If you have that setting, you might try toggling it the other way.

I realize you have a VIA chipset, but on my NVidia board, there is a BIOS entry for assigning drives to the NVRaid subsystem. If a drive is handled by NVRaid, it doesn't show up in the BIOS. Make sure you don't have something equivalent. If you have some kind of RAID capability on the board, and had handed off 'control' of the drives to the RAID system, but didn't turn the RAID system _on_, it would cause exactly that symptom. (it's a bit of a reach, I know.)

The fact that you lost two drives at once makes me think it's a BIOS or motherboard issue. Hopefully it's BIOS, because that's easy to fix.
posted by Malor at 7:24 PM on March 5, 2006

Response by poster: After the new PCI SATA card I ordered turned up (and I got back from Berlin), I tried telling the BIOS to reset to defaults (as a last check before installing the card), and that fixed it. Yay! (This is the kind of hardware troubleshooting that just wouldn't have occurred to me.) So it turns out that I have a spare PCI SATA card.

(I can't see how the problem was caused - I haven't been monkeying around in the BIOS for ages, and I'd expect that an electrical hiccup would have reset it to defaults, which worked. I blame cosmic rays or gremlins.)

Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.
posted by wilberforce at 2:17 AM on March 15, 2006