BIOS stopped detecting hard drives

[YoBagonGo]

Hello world,
Im having an annoying problem with my two hard drives. I restarted my computer last night and when I tried to reboot it doesnt detect either of my hard drives and asks me to put in "bootable" media. I went into the bios to check my boot sequence and it has my two cd/dvd drives, network card, but no hard drives . In an effort to narrow down the problem I took the following steps.

1. Made sure the IDE and power cables were in tight.
2. Put in a boot cd to see if windows could detect it when installing a fresh copy of windows. It could not
3. Tried resetting the bios by pulling the battery
4. Tried replacing my hard drive IDE cable with a brand new one
5. Noting that it detects my cd/dvd drives, I tried replacing both the power and IDE cables with the ones from the cd/dvd drives.
6. Thinking that it might be a problem with supplying power to the drives. I unplugged all nonessential drives and boards and tried booting minimally.

If anyone has any ideas about more ways I can narrow down the problem or perhaps a solution I will declare you my own personal savior. Thank you.

 

[DaMadScientist]

was it a master/slave configuration or a raid one ? You basically tried every troubleshooting procedure...sounds to me like your harddrives went bad and need replacement

 

[Nitestick]

two drives failing at the same time is unlikely. if all your drives are IDE i think it's quite possible one failed drive is wreaking havoc. try disconnecting all drives and attaching them individually as a master.

 

[YoBagonGo]

So far it seems like you were 100 percent correct nitestick. I hooked up the prior "slave" hard drive as the master and I was able to get it to detect . Sucks that the pooched one was the one with the os on it but w/e Ill take 2 hours work reinstalling everything over a useless hunk of metal. You sir are my new hero .

 

[Nitestick]

why thank you

'tis better to have 3 working drives and no OS than no working drives and no OS. i've just seen this quite a lot, believe me i know this one is a pain in the butt to diagnose.