Has anyone experienced this problem with hard drives before?

[Arkitech]

About a month ago my hard drive crashed and I had to use another one to rebuild my system. I later found out that my drive had'nt really crashed and burned like I thought because I was able to make full use of it when it was set to slave. However it still would'nt boot up when it was set to master. Then just yesterday the new drive I had been using as master suddenly started having problems. First my system started freezing, I did a reboot and I got a blue error screen saying that windows could not write to C. I did another reboot and my master drive was no longer detected, my slave drive appears but it won't boot.

Anybody have a clue why this might be happening? I'm guessing that its probably the controller or maybe the ribbon cable.

 

[Duvie]

Problem with boot sectors? I had a virus once that caused it...I reinstalled windows but it came with it because an old bootup disk had it on it...it seemed to piggy back anything I would write to.

More specs on system please...are you ocing any?

 

[Duvie]

It may be a controller issue...try another ribbon...

See if it identifies and finds your master drive now... Hook up a cd-rom to the slave and try to boot off of win 98 disk...I don't belive a virus would be able to infect it since you didn't burn it...If you still have problems then maybe it is controller...then

1) reinstall ide controller drivers

 

[MikeO]

I would check the cables first, and make sure they work. After that I would make sure both of the hd's work in another comp as master. After that it's pretty much narrowed to the mobo/controller I guess...

 

[Frost]

Thats what I would check would first be the ribben cable. If that doesn't help, maybe try using IDE2 instead of IDE1, you are running off the mobo correct? IF that doesn't help it could be a virus like duvie suggested, but I think a bad controller/cable is more likely.

 

[Tideman]

This might be reaching a bit, but have you tried to fdisk the master boot record to erase it?

fdisk /mbr at a DOS Prompt.

 

[Arkitech]

I orginally thought that maybe the first hard drive had crashed because of a virus, so when I started rebuilding the new drive I installed Innoculate virus protection.

Can a virus actually make a drive invisible to the bios, I know viruses can prevent a system from booting but I never heard of one making a drive undetecable to bios.

Some further specs on my sys

Athlon 700
256mb
master drive - western digital 8 gig (currently not being detected)
slave drive - maxtor 30 gig (slave)
OS - Win98se

 

[CTweak]

Sounds like a controller problem. As others suggested, start by swapping ribbon cables, and try running your drives off the MB's IDE2 channel - see of that helps. Bad news is, it's possible a bad controller could be damaging the drives themselves, or at least scrambling the data on them.

 

[bacillus]

what m/board have you got?? is it an A7V? :frown: