I have an hp pavilion a818n, intel pent. 4 processor 512mb pc3200 ddr sdram, serial ATA 160 gb hard drive. I did a destructive system recovery on it and updated everything and everything was running alright. Now, all of a sudden, the hard drive light does not come on, it tries to boot from the dvd drive only and in BIOS there is no hard drive detected. Does this happen if the hard drive is bad, sound like a power failure of some kind or is the ATA serial cable bad, or are there any other suggestions? The hard drive did not make any noise or anything, just as if it is not there at all. Please help, what should I do or where should I start? Thank you
Assuming your power cable is connected properly to the hard drive, then you probably have a bad drive. This normally happens when something on the board shorts. If you have an identical drive, you can most likely swap the board on the hard drive and it will still work. I've had to do this in the past. Usually if it's a failure because of the read/write head or bad sectors, the drive will turn on. The problem could also be with the controller card on your motherboard. You can test this by trying your hard drive in another computer or trying a known good hard drive in this computer. If it's a bad controller card, then you should probably replace the motherboard (hopefully it's under warranty). You could also add a PCI controller card, but if one thing goes bad on your motherboard, then something else is likely to go bad soon. PS - If the controller card is bad, that would keep the hard drive from showing up in the BIOS, but it would still get power from the power supply. Thus, the more likely case is my first paragraph.
This drive is ATA and the other extra drives and computers take ide cable. How do I switch between the two? The motherboard has a connection for the ide cable but it is smaller then the extra cable that I have. Also, I do not have a recovery disk so if I get a new drive I will have to order a ner recovery disk, correct?
when your bios does auto-detect hit pause button after all is detected ...look over the list and be sure it's not there -if it's a SATA it'll say 3rd Master -if IDE it'll say pri Master or sec master -be sure it's not pri slave or sec slave hit F8 just after detect and see it will give you a boot list..not all bios are the same
oh ya and double check your cables check to be sure pinned right i'm guessing your harddrive it toast you should get a spinning noise if you plug power cable in while power is on or test it in an enclosure that has an off and on switch good luck with the trouble shoot
