unable to see harddrive

Let'sgoflying!

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Dave Taylor
Crashing, blue screen of death, lockups and then No Harddrive found.
I pulled the hd and inspected, cleaned contacts - reinstalled to no avail.
"Primary Harddrive disk not found"
"No bootable devices"
 
did you try moving it to a different conector on the motherboard? Does your CDrom work? How bout check in your bios setup, try to search for HD or manualy configure it. there are ussualy a primary and secondary slot for HDs on motherboards. If that doesnt work, either, A: your mother board is fried, or B: your HD is fried.
 
What Michael said except that it may just be your HD controller on your motherboard. You can typically pick one up for $20 or so if you don't need the latest and greatest.
 
Are you hearing a clicking/knocking noise from the hard drive?

If so. You are screwed. There is a company called Ontrack that will look at it for $500 and tell you if they can recover anything.

Now based on the problem you said. I'm leaning towards bad hard drive. That is about 95% more likely then the motherboard failing. Hard drive spins at several thousand rpm..typically 5200 or 7200. They will fail eventually.

Try hooking just your cd rom drive up and see if it detects (make sure jumper is set to master when you do this) If it does motherboard is fine.

If you want to save yourself some time. Just take it to any local shop, any decent PC technican can tell you in under 30 seconds.
 
jangell said:
Hard drive spins at several thousand rpm..typically 5200 or 7200. They will fail eventually.
It's actually 5400. RPMs are always a multiple of 60. Probably a frequency driven motor but I don't remember if that's the actual reason or not.
 
Brian Austin said:
It's actually 5400. RPMs are always a multiple of 60. Probably a frequency driven motor but I don't remember if that's the actual reason or not.

Typo, and you caught it.

Now the question is. Do 10,000 RPM drives actually spin at 10,000 RPM.. Or are they 10020 10080 ..etc
 
Depending on the motherboard and age, I wouldn't rule out a bad CMOS battery on the motherboard, either.
 
Maybe - if its really old. Most computers since oh, 1997 have been able to autodetect the hard drive. Probably earlier than that IIRC.
 
Brian Austin said:
It's actually 5400. RPMs are always a multiple of 60. Probably a frequency driven motor but I don't remember if that's the actual reason or not.

Every hard drive I had worked on used a servo with an optical RPM readout to ensure the speed. Using a 60HZ form the power lines for a time base is not a good idea. The power companies will let that drift fairly significantly. Also if the drive were to be used with a UPS it would really go to heck as those things can be quite a lot out of spec plus you would then also have to develop the 60Hz when running form battery power. Instead the speed is locked to your master clock.
 
smigaldi said:
Every hard drive I had worked on used a servo with an optical RPM readout to ensure the speed. Using a 60HZ form the power lines for a time base is not a good idea. The power companies will let that drift fairly significantly. Also if the drive were to be used with a UPS it would really go to heck as those things can be quite a lot out of spec plus you would then also have to develop the 60Hz when running form battery power. Instead the speed is locked to your master clock.
According to my electronics instructors, the ONLY element of the US power grid that is regulated is the frequency of the a/c signal. It must be between 59.5Hz and 60.5Hz. Voltage is not regulated (and will vary by as much as 10% depending on loads) and current is based on draw (obviously).

That said, I don't know what the drive uses and prefaced that with "I believe..." for a reason. :D
 
Well.

Remember.
The power supply is going to be supplying the hard drive with DC power.
 
smigaldi said:
Instead the speed is locked to your master clock.

Drive speed is regulated on the drive electronics itself. It is independent of system master clock and independent of the power line frequency. The same drive will work in a variety of machines, as long as the drive bus speed os high enough to support data transfer.

Greebo said:
Maybe - if its really old. Most computers since oh, 1997 have been able to autodetect the hard drive. Probably earlier than that IIRC.

"Able To", yes. But most BIOS systems allow manual setting of the drive specs. Most BIOS systems also allow the controller to be turned off, or the boot order to be reset.

If the wrong bit gets set in CMOS somehow, the default might not happen. This can occur with a dead battery (though you will usually get a prompt that the CMOS needs to be reset)...

Dave, a very similar thing happened to me recently. The solution was a motherboardectomy.
 
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Thanks, will get to work on it.

Hey with all the people responding, I gotta ask. Does everyone have this kind of problem? How did you all (the non-techs) get familiar with the innards and lingo associated with computers? Is the technology that weak that the average person needs to know how to fix a motherboard, a cmos battery etc?
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
Thanks, will get to work on it.

Hey with all the people responding, I gotta ask. Does everyone have this kind of problem? How did you all (the non-techs) get familiar with the innards and lingo associated with computers? Is the technology that weak that the average person needs to know how to fix a motherboard, a cmos battery etc?

Dave,

personal computers (pre-IBM PC) were coming on the scene when I was working on my EE degree many moons ago. I built an early Z-80/S-100 based system from kit-parts (back then it meant soldering parts to the circuit boards), and modified the BIOS programming to meet my needs. I still have a couple of 8" drives in the garage somewhere.

Since then, I've moved on from engineering, but I still build my own computers at a higher level.

So I guess for me the terms are engrained.

The technology isn't weak, but it's complex enough that things don't always play together nicely. Or parts eventually give up (a CMOS battery is like your watch battery, it'll last about 5 years... and most computer makers figure you'll replace the computer by then). When things don't play together nicely, even some of the computer pros scratch their heads.

Unfortunately, viruses and internet exploits are making a lot of people learn more about their computers than they ever imagined.
 
wsuffa said:
Drive speed is regulated on the drive electronics itself. It is independent of system master clock and independent of the power line frequency. The same drive will work in a variety of machines, as long as the drive bus speed os high enough to support data transfer.
Perhaps in the PC in the old HP 21MX it was synched to the master station clock but did have interanl capability to run on its own if not synched. It has been 20 years since I worked on disk drives.

Brian Austin said:
According to my electronics instructors, the ONLY element of the US power grid that is regulated is the frequency of the a/c signal. It must be between 59.5Hz and 60.5Hz. Voltage is not regulated (and will vary by as much as 10% depending on loads) and current is based on draw (obviously).

That said, I don't know what the drive uses and prefaced that with "I believe..." for a reason. :D
10% is a huge margin. For the disk drive example that would be 540RPM.
 
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smigaldi said:
10% is a huge margin. For the disk drive example that would be 540RPM.
10% of voltage, not frequency. Most a/c devices either don't care or regulate it themselves (usually stepping down).

And it wouldn't matter anyway. Apparently I hadn't had enough caffiene yet: DC doesn't have a frequency and a PC power supply doesn't kick out AC. ;)
 
smigaldi said:
Perhaps in the PC in the old HP 21MX it was synched to the master station clock but did have interanl capability to run on its own if not synched. It has been 20 years since I worked on disk drives.

Mid 70's. :hairraise: Entirely possible that it was synched. HP may even have custom built the drive for the machine. :hairraise:
 
Greebo said:
DC doesn't have a frequency?

0 HZ. :D

What they do to generate a frequency equivalent to the speed of the disk is on the spindle add a wheel that has alternating clear and opaque spots. Then on one side of the wheel you shine a light (usually iR) through it to a photo receptor. What you get a square wave at a frequency equal to the RPM. Then you can compare that frequency to a reference and then make changes to the DC voltage to speed up or slow down the motor.
 
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