Now what part of my computer is messed up!?

[AffanTech]

I first thought my hard drive crashed but it was running fine when i connected it as an external drive to another computer, although I didn't boot from it. I was able to retrieve important stuff and now I am trying to diagnose the problem. I am guessing the sata controllers on the motherboard are messed up because i tried installing XP on a new hard drive and windows was not able to detect any hard drive. Do i have to replace the motherboard? What other tests can I do? My computer is almost 3 years old and I was thinking of upgrading it anyways.

Oh and the PSU has been making some strange noises lately when computer boots up only! I wonder if that fried the motherboard?

 

[Harvey]

1. Assuming they're IDE drives, try new IDE cables.

2. Make sure the jumpers on All your IDE drives are set correctly as Master, Slave or Cable Select.

3. Some motherboards have problems recognizing some brands of drives when set to CS. Sometimes it depends on the makes of both drives on the same IDE channel. Try setting all of your IDE drives as Master or Slave, including any CD/DVD drives. If the system now recogizes your drives, you can try CS again, later.

4. Try unplugging your IDE drives and running your finger along the connector contacts on each drive. I know this will sound weird, and the only have a theory about why this works is that it discharges, alters or resets some transient invalid state in the drive's electronics, but has worked for me far too many times for it to be a coincidence.

I hope that helps.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: AffanTech
Oh and the PSU has been making some strange noises lately when computer boots up only! I wonder if that fried the motherboard?

That's quite likely. Of course, after three years, your SATA ports can "just fail", too. Use this as an excuse to upgrade, if you want, but all you'd have to do to fix that computer is buy an SATA controller card: link. Oh yeah, welcome to anandtech.

 

[DimZiE]

try disabling RAID on the SATA controller