I picked up two Hitachi HDS7222 250Gb Hard Drives (IDE connectors) from a friend who previously used them on his Mac. I reformatted both as NTSC and had them working. Then one drive (X:) dropped off the radar - it no longer showed up in my computer, device manager or disk management. It did show in BIOS but then even that ceased. A few hours later the other drive (H:) has stopped showing in Windows as well but still picks up in BIOS.

What could be causing this. Drive X: seems totally dead, refusing to even spin up. I've just backed up onto drive H: and would really like to have things working.

Having recently replaced the motherboard (identical) and upgraded the CPU from AMD 3200 to AMD X2 4200, I notice that the BIOS still appears to be the original F1 version. I have a floppy with F8 but am hesitant to flash the BIOS as last time I lost a partition in my RAID 0 and had to do major data recovery.

Could BIOS be the problem.
Or is the PSU possibly delivering too much/little juice?

Any other potential candidates?

System specs:

Mobo: GA K8NSC 939
RAM: 2 x 512Mb DDR400
CPU: AMD X2 4200+
PSU: Enermax Noisetaker 485W
2 x 120Gb HD running RAID 0 (OS on these)
OS: XP MCE

TIA for any help

This post has been edited by digikiwi: Nov 25 2006, 09:38 PM

Drive not showing in BIOS probably dead, but check power connector hasn't come loose. Other drive which shows in BIOS but not in Windows may now need to be re-configured as master if it's currently set as slave, because the dead drive (currently the master) is effectively not there anymore.

Hi pip22

I had already tried resetting to master (I presume you're talking about the jumper settings). Also tried swapping IDE cable, swapping power connector (on the same cable).

I'm wondering if my PSU is spiking on startup or something, causing the problem. I'm concerned that if I replace the drives the same thing may happen. Why would two drives show the same symptoms in such quick succession?

If I hook up a multimeter to the power connector, what are acceptable voltage varaiances for the 3, 5 and 12 V rails ?

That cable delivers a steady +12.15V and +5.14V respectively, including on startup. If I plug the H: drive in the 12V goes down to 12.12V whcih doesn't seem like a huge jump.

Also regarding BIOS: Is updating it likely to make a differernce?

Thanks

This post has been edited by digikiwi: Nov 26 2006, 02:05 PM