Hard Drive not booting

bartman

fwor wrote: »

Sorry if this is bleedin' obvious to you, but don't let it boot from your HDD or you may run into problems with Windows detecting a major hardware change, and requiring you to re-activate it...

Yes, I thought that would lead to problems. I thought I would just connect it and then go into the bios to see if it's detected. It won't fix the problem but at least would give me a clue as to where the problem is I suppose.
I'm open to any other suggestions!

bartman

I've just connected my hdd to the non-working desktop, and that doesn't show up in the bios either - not sure where that leaves me now - any ideas on the next step?

Mondez

Sounds like the controller board might have failed on the HD, not much you can do I'm afraid unless you happen to have an identicle drive about to try swapping the controller boards over.

bartman

Mondez wrote: »

Sounds like the controller board might have failed on the HD, not much you can do I'm afraid unless you happen to have an identicle drive about to try swapping the controller boards over.

I don't really see the logic of that. As I said above, the HD from my working computer also failed to be detected by the bios in the computer I am trying to fix - so it would appear that the fault is not with the HD belonging to that computer.

Mondez

Sorry, my reading comprehension completely failed me and I read it as you plugged the none working drive into a working system and it wasn't detected. Oops. Sounds like your initial suspicion of mainboard fault is correct, I take it the optical drive isn't attached by SATA if that still works?

bartman

Mondez wrote: »

Sorry, my reading comprehension completely failed me and I read it as you plugged the none working drive into a working system and it wasn't detected. Oops. Sounds like your initial suspicion of mainboard fault is correct, I take it the optical drive isn't attached by SATA if that still works?

That's right, it's not a SATA DVD drive. I'm just about out of ideas now - beginning to wonder about putting one of my old PATA HDs in it as a system drive, and using the SATA drive connected as an external USB.

stilltheone

Go into the BIOS. When you enter BIOS, under IDE configuration, there should be a line similar to: Configure SATA As...

The options may be; Standard IDE, AHCI mode or RAID mode. Try enabling AHCI, failing that, RAID.

I don't have the BIOS interface in front of me, so I'm guessing.

bartman

stilltheone wrote: »

Go into the BIOS. When you enter BIOS, under IDE configuration, there should be a line similar to: Configure SATA As...

The options may be; Standard IDE, AHCI mode or RAID mode. Try enabling AHCI, failing that, RAID.

I don't have the BIOS interface in front of me, so I'm guessing.

Can't find that menu. When i go into "advanced" then "onboard device configuration" I have "IDE function setup. In that there is:

OnChip IDE channel 0
OnChip IDE channel 1
IDE DMA transfer access
SATA Port 1,2
SATA DMA transfer
SATA Port 3,4
SATA2 DMA transfer
IDE Prefech mode

For each of those the option is enable/disable. They are all enabled.

I can't see any other menu which is close to the one suggested.

stilltheone

Perhaps try your question on the ASUS M2N4-SLI forum.

bartman

I still haven't resolved this.
Assuming the problem is with the motherboard's SATA controller, I was wondering whether I could get round the problem by adding a PCI-e card with SATA ports?
One potential problem I can see is that they appear to be supplied with the driver on a disc which looks as though it has to be installed under Windows. If so, that's all very well if you're installing additional SATA ports for additional drives etc, but no good if it's for the system drive, as Windows won't be there to install the driver!
Does anybody have any experience of doing this?