SATA HDD no longer shows in BIOS

I have 2 titan gladiator systems speced as follows
Asus P5N-D
Intel core 2 quad 2.5Ghz
OCZ DDR2 4Gb Platinum Edition
ModXstream Pro 700w
Nvidia 9800 GTX+
SATA Maxtor DiamondMax 22 500Gb.
SATA Samsung Super Writemaster
Antec 900

Both systems were running fine, yesterday i received some new creative fatal1ty headsets and shut down the systems to plug them in. When I restarted the systems neither would boot and both showed a no system disk found error message. On checking the BIOS the HDD was no longer showing in either although the optical drives were.
After a few hours research i suspect i've picked up a virus that has corrupted the BIOS in someway, as both HDD failing at the same time or me having damaged them plugging in a headset seems doubtful.
In an attempt to remedy the problem i removed the Motherboard battery and shorted the connections, then left the battery out for 30 mins(as recommended on another site) then i flashed the bios with the latest version and reset to default settings. This had no effect, i've since tried a new SATA cable just to rule it out and swapped the ports but the Optical drive shows on either port while the HDD shows on neither.
If anyone has any ideas what the problem could be or anything else i could do to remedy it your advice would be most welcome.
Thanks
Ralph

PS sorry for the long winded post but its been a long day and i didn't want to miss anything out.

 

Hi there, I just had a similar situation with my new build. After rebooting, the SATA hard drive was not recognized.

I took the hard drive back to Micro Center, they tested it and found out that it was bad.

I installed a new drive and all has been well since.

Go figure!

 

If it wasn't for exactly the same thing happening on both systems at exactly the same time I'd assume it was a faulty drive. But like I said the chances of the drives failing in both systems at exactly the same time seems very remote. So I have to assume its something else. If it wasn't for the chance of infecting another PC I'd whip the drives out and test them in another system but i don't want to kill the one good system I have left.

Thanks for the reply
Ralph

 

It appears that this is a common fault on certain Seagate and Maxtor drives. The fact that it happened on both at exactly the same time seems to be just a curve ball to send me searching in the wrong direction.

If your using a Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA or DiamondMax 22 Drive I strongly suggest you follow this link and update your firmware before yours fails on you, I have read some suggestions that the firmware update can lead to other problems but what ever they are theve got to be better than the complete data loss i've suffered.
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931&NewLang=en



Edit: typos