I am a systems programmer and as such it seems that every neighbor, relative and personal aquaintance comes to me with their pc problems and questions.
A neighbor called me the other night to help him install a new 80gb harddrive and drive tray in his pc because he was fearful that his existing drive was about to bite the dust.
Not being certain whether his bios would recognize the larger drive I suggested that I bring one of my 80 gb drives over, install the tray, and use my drive to see if the bios would recognize it. If not, he would be able to return his unopened drive to the retailer.
A simple drive tray installation, and in goes my drive (as a slave). Not only did the bios not recognize my drive; neither did it see his current drive. No matter what I did there seemed to be no resolution.
Thinking his old drive had finally died I took his drive to my home and put it into my machine as a single drive. No luck. Conclusion… his drive was gone. When I put my master andslave drives back into my machine as normal, the two drives could not be seen on startup. I took my 2 drives to my pc at work and the master drive works fine but the 80 gb drive I had used in his pc was still not seen. What is up with that?
Is it possible that his machine had a virus that disables the ide channels by affecting the cmos/bios. It only seems to have affected the ability of the bios to see ide drives because my atapi/ide cd burner is still being recognized. Should I try to flash my bios and retry? Is my drive dead? Are my motherboard drive controllers shot? Help would be greatly appreciated.