My hard drive not found either

I have a stupid Gateway computer. Today, I think my hard drive died. When I boot up it says "hard drive not found." I was moving my computer so at first I thought maybe I had just bumped something loose, but I jiggled the connectors and it seems to still be DOA.

It had / has Windows XP on it. I have the original OS disc from Gateway. So I can restore if I have to.

I have 2 hard drived in this machine, the primary drive is a Western Digital. Is there a program I can use to run diagnostics on it? ( I can't seem to get the the Majorgeeks.com site to browse the diagnostics section. Only forums.majorgeeks comes up for me.)

This might be too product-specific to answer, but I'll ask anyway. If the primary disc is dead, can I turn my slave drive into my primary and install the OS on to it without messing up the data I have there? I keep mostly my backups on it, so I really don't want to write over those.

This so sucks.

 

Maby your cmos is skrewed up

 

Maybe, but how could I tell? The clock seems to be working. I don't know squat about this stuff. I'm lucky my hubby's laptop is here so I can Google. I can't even remember what was involved in adding the second drive. Something about jumpers...

This sucks.

 

Off in Googleland = I'm in the BIOS set up now. Under IDE configuration, the IDE COntroller is "Both" the PCI IDE Bus MAster is "Enabled" and the hard disk pre-delay is disabled.

Primary IDE Master and Slave fields are "undetected." The Secondary IDE Master is "LITE-ON Combo LTC-4816" which is, I assume, my secondary drive. The Secondary Slave is "not detected."

I found a Western Digital has a diagnostic tool, but it's a zip file so I don't think it's gonna work for me because I can't boot.

Oh I just don't know what to do. I know , I know...woe is me.

 

I don't seem to have an Auto-detect, that I can find. The 3 IDEs that are "not detected" are grayed, so I can't scroll to them. If I highlight the IDE Secondary Master, the Help type stuff on the right says "While entering setup, BIOS auto detects the presence of IDE devices. This displays the status of auto detection of IDE devices." So, based on that, I am going to assume that it is already set to auto-detect and not look for it any farther unless you tell me otherwise.


Before I saw your post, I was changing settings, trying to see if I could get it to boot off my slave drive ( I couldn't - I thought I might still have Windows 2000 on there but I am not even sure I do). After I changed it all back, it booted for me, but a blue screen showed up right after my user settings and desktop loaded. .

I am now going to pop the battery out and see what happens. I'll be back in about 25 minutes.

Thanks bunches for your help, by the way! I'd cook lasagna for you all if you were around locally.

 

I didn't get an error code. I left the PC off for 20 minutes, no battery, unplugged from the wall too. I actually own a battery tester, and it seems that the little silver battery not putting out anywhere near 3 volts, btw. It's not even putting out 1.5, the lowest scale on the tester.

Anyway,

I power up, and it says:
Copyright 1996-2003 INtel Corporation
SR8 (long number here)

Intel Celeron Processor, 2.6 Ghz

248 System Ram

Legacy Keyboard...Detected
USB Legacy.....Enabled

"Auto detecting USB mass storage devices..
00 USB mass storage devices found and configured.
ATAPI CD-ROM SM-LITE-ON Combo LTC-48161H

CMOS/GPNV Checksum Bad
CMOS Date/Time Not Set

Press <F4> to Run SETUP

(Do I press F4?)

 

Do I have to do that before I go any farther? I don't have a battery here.

 

I am beginning to think this might motion-related or new-mouse related Remember in my first post I mentioned I had been moving the PC? That was because the cable on my optical mouse went bad, so I was replacing it. I had to turn the case on it's face to reach the back. That's when all this started.

Then, in order to find out what kind of drive I had I needed to pull the drive out. I put it all back together and was able to boot. That's where I left off last night

Not being much on patience, I pressed F4. It went into the BIOS settings, but I just exited and voila! The PC booted. I used that opportunity to run the Western Digital Diagnostic software, and the drive passed with flying colors.

Because I had to shut down all my programs to run the diagnostic program, I rebooted. <bangs head> and I got the "drive not found" again. But I also got a new message, when the Intel Boot Agent was trying to start. "PXE-E61: Media Test Failure, Check Cable."

I took the hard drive out and put it back in, can't boot.

The ribbon cable runs from the mother board, to the slave drive, then to the master drive. So I took slave out of the loop, and used that connector to attach to the master. Now I am booted again.

Do I need a new ribbon cable too, maybe? Or is all this happening because my hard drive is coughing up blood, even though it tests perfectly ok?

I'm off to back up stuff.