I'm running 2 WD 500GB Sata HD's (just plugged in and used-no raid)
and have a Sony Sata DVD-RW/CD-R
I built my system about a year ago with very little problems since. When I restarted my computer yesterday morning, the secondary drive did not show up in either windows xp (pro) or the Bios. So I restarted, unplugged, etc. When I restarted now windows won't load and hangs at windows logo then perpetually restarts. I removed the secondary drive and tried again, still in restart cycle. Since there wasn't anything on the main drive that I couldn't live without, and it was still showin ing in the bios, I reformatted and reinstalled windows. Now I can log back into windows, DVD drive shows, everything fine. I shut off system and reinstall secondary drive. Now my system starts up and shows NO HDD's in Bios???
I remove drive and it starts up fine. I try unhooking the DVD drive and using that Sata controller for the secondary hard drive, it starts up, windows sees the secondary drive. I attempt to start transferring my important info and the computer freezes about 30 mintues later. When I restart the computer, once again I have NO HDD's in Bios. After playing switcheroo with every extra sata cable/sata power cable I have, nothing works to make both drives work together. I take out the secondary drive and try to install the DVD drive again. It shows the primary drive but not the DVD drive. After about 4 restarts it finally shows both of them and I can use Windows.
I'm so frustrated at this point that I don't know what to do. I have some very important stuff on that drive but there is no way I can afford 500 bucks for data recovery. I would just say the drive is fubar, but the whole making the primary disappear thing throws me (and I can still hear the drive spin up and run). The way I understood it, Sata drives are not interdependent like IDE so they shouldn't have to have jumpers or affect eachother like that right?
THANK YOU for any suggestions, I would appreciate it.
Also, Bios is Pheonix and when visiting the site, they state that they do not give out the bios upgrades to end users.
From my understanding about sata drives you are correct. I have one more idea that you can try it will cost you abour $30 unless you know someone who has one. I would say get a hdd enclosure that works for sata drives so u can try hooking it up externaly thru a usb port. This way if the hdd is failing you should be able to boot and might be able to remove your files. It might take some time especially if the hdd only works for like an hour. This is what i did with a bad hdd that i had a lot of games on. May or may not work for you.
Sounds fairly typical. nforce S-ATA chipsets are painfully unreliable. Best bet is to get a new motherboard without one, but I warn you, you will need to reinstall windows. Good news is the data on your hard disks should still be intact.
