Problem with computer not seeing hard drive after a day!

[blackhawk]

This happened on my daughter's computer last weekend while I was away. Its an Asus Tuv4x with a tualitan, sb live, 512mb of ram, maxtor hard drive with winME. When I tried to boot up, it doesn't see a hard drive or detect one, although it did once but then lost it going into loading the OS.

I took the hard drive out and tried it on another computer, it didn't see it so figured the drive was the problem. Swapped out a spare 40gb and reloaded and setup everything on it. Rebooted a dozen times without problem. Bios has auto setting for hard drive detection and does every time. Then a day later, my daughter has the same problem! Tried a different ide cable on another computer and sees it fine twice. Now I'm guessing it may be the mb as I've had problems with it before with memory controller and had it replaced by asus although it still wouldn't run my crucial ram with the latest bios.

So yesterday, I spend the whole morning swapping out this tuv4x for an old abit vh6 II I have sitting around and put an adaptor in for the tualitan, redo all the hardware and reset the software, just a few problems with conflicts with the d**n ati tv card as usual but works fine for me. Then same problem last nite

Haven't had time to update 4 in 1s or the os even.

Now, common parts, via chipset, sb live, winME, cable?, power supply. What next? Any ideas?


*update*...ran it this morning for about 20 minutes until a hard freeze, then reboot and no hard drive again........so, pulled the power supply(powerman 250w) and replaced it with an enermax 230w and it seems OK, running memtest on a loop right now

I do run another via chipset tyan thats doing fine but dont want to do any more swapping until I find the problem.

[ShibasScotch]

It could be the psu, however, I had a similar problem with a soyo dragon and sb live. What was happening was the system would start to install win xp, and halfway through, it woould jsut lock up, and when i rebooted, the hd would not show up. I would take out the sb live to install os, if that doesnt work, try removing everything except video and ram. Also, make sure that the Ram and the ide cabels are firmly seated where they should be. make sure there is no lose screws inside the case, touching anything. One last thing to try, is flash the bios on the board.

[Absolut Talent]

Take it from a guy who has many problems with his harddrives on a daily basis

PSUs can be to blame for 65% of the harddrives not being recognised, most of the time because of faulty/loose molexes.

Nexttime this happens, try to listen to the harddrive when you boot up, does it sound like its spinning? or starts to spin but doesnt continue (almost seems to die out). THen its the molexes

Took me a good week to figure that out on my animeserver

[blackhawk]

Sounds like it could've been conflicts with the sblive card but it was running in this system for months without problem. The ati tv card always had conflicts with the creative webcam for the video driver. It was the only reason I still ran winME on this one so I'll bite the bullet and pick up a new leadtek tv2000xp card for hers or swap in the 8500aiw for her.

I really want to take that celeron back up to 133fsb/1333mz where its been sitting the last year. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions.


**Looks like all is well with the setup, probably the sblive conflict rearing its head again, cpu back up to 1333mz, within 5 minutes of taking it online to get some xp updates, msblast worm!...................finally got billy gates "Security Update CD" that is current up to feb 04 for all ms os'........also a free av from him!**

sp2 is supposed to be out in the summer but I just paid 15 bucks for sp1