SATA HDD not found - Boot Error

[jimgolfgti]

Wonder if anyone can shed any light on this problem......

I have a strange error with my desktop. I booted by computer today into Win XP SP2, logged in and walked away for 30 mins or so. On returning to the computer I found that instead of being logged into Win XP as I had left it, it was waiting at the post BIOS boot screen with the message 'INSERT SYSTEM DISK' or words to that affect.

I pressed CNTL+ALT+DEL and waited for drives to be autodetected and noticed that only my PATA DVD had been found but the SATA HDD was not found. I waited for the message to re-appear about the lack of a system volume and when it did I powered off and waited 10 seconds or so before pressing the power button again.

This time the internal speaker played several beeps but not a message reported in my BIOS manual. Sort of accending notes followed by a loud buzz. The BIOS reports memory at single channel, normal, then attempts to find drives but seems to not do anything more except play the same beeps from the speaker every 10 seconds or so. On pressing Delete to enter BIOS the message changes but it never goes into the BIOS configuration.

Has anyone seen this occur before??

Need to know whether this could be software rather than a hardware problem.

SPEC:
Gigabyte 8IPE1000-G F3
512 Mb DDR RAM
160Gb Maxtor YAR51HWO

 

[jono199]

I don't see why it would be a software problem.

Check your connectors and stuff like that.

 

[Rizinc4]

Go into your BIOS and set the factory defaults. Then go back in and make sure Power Management is disabled in your BIOS. Then reboot saving settings, and press F8 until your given a few things to choose from. Here choose the Command Prompt only, and you should be able to type:

format c:

Hit enter, and then it will ask if your sure you want to do this... you will lose all data, blah blah blah, just tap the y key for yes and hit enter. When this finishes (shouldn't take long), it will reboot, you should now put your Operating System disk in. It should boot directly from it. If it doesn't, either move your CD-ROM to a number on the boot priorety before your hard drive, OR, reboot your machine and press F8 again, (with your disk in), and when the screen pops up, go to command prompt only agan. Now you will just have to type the following:

D: (or the letter assigned to your CD-ROM drive)

setup

It should take over from here...