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Some time ago my power supply died. It's a long story from then till now, but the important bit is that I ended up with a new hard drive and a new power supply. I tested to see if my original hard drive was still alive, and it booted and worked perfectly until I turned it off. When I started it again it would not boot. I bought new SATA cables, assuming that the one I had was not seating properly (it was cheap and wobbly), but no dice.

Upon start-up I am presented with a message telling me to insert boot media into the selected drive or add a drive and restart. Neither the new or the old drive is detected by BIOS, my Vista install disk, or from my bootable Linux USB drive. When I remove all of the RAM the computer ceases outputting visual information, and upon reinstalling the ram and starting up again gives me a "failed overclock" error.

So, does anyone have an idea as to what might be going on? I'm completely lost at this point.

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Are you using 1.5, 3 or 6 Gb/s SATA connection? I had a problem where my drive wasn't detected until I changed from 6 to 3 - dunno how relevant this is to you. – Pubby Oct 12 '11 at 0:37
Your hard drive is toast. RMA if you can, chuck it if you can't. – Sammitch May 14 at 21:54

2 Answers

Is your hard drive one of the ready to fail Seagate drives? I had a problem very similar. Was working until I turned the machine off and the bamb the drive was gone. I later got it replaced as Seagate had a firmware problem that killed hard drives. There is information on their site so you can check out weather your drive is effected or not.

A computer is never going to boot with no memory and the error about failed overclock is likely because the system knows it started but couldn't successfully POST.

Cheers

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I don't think so, both of my drives are manufactured by Western Digital. Any other ideas? – user28927 Feb 22 '10 at 0:56

Are you sure that the drive is good? Have you tested it on another system? It could be that the drive has also failed... Unlikely, but a bad power suppy can damage anything plugged into it...

Also check your motherboard's bios for drive settings, see if there is a legacy mode for the sata drive. Try that setting....

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Well, I suppose it is possible that the drive failed after using it for an hour on the new power supply, and that my new drive is defective, but I haven't got the resources to test that at the moment. As for the SATA legacy mode, I'm not seeing such a setting in my BIOS. Is it likely that I'm missing this, and if so where is it hiding? – user28927 Feb 26 '10 at 7:16
What Bios do you have? – Benjamin Schollnick Feb 27 '10 at 22:37
American Megatrends AMIBIOs v2.6. – user28927 Mar 2 '10 at 20:58

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