No Response From Hard Disk Drive

[Amaresh]

When i turned on my computer today. A strange image of "no boot media detected" or something like prompted on my monitor.

I also tried rebooting and thought that some problem in the bios but it had a bigger surprise awaited for me. the hard disk drive is gone from my sata devices list.

Please provide some reasons regarding this as how to behave at such situation

[Hardwareman]

if its not showing up in the device list the first thing to check is all the cables are firmly attached. If that doesn't achieve anything and you have spare replacement cables swap them over.

[Maxforu]

Try getting into bios and makesure that the Hard drive is set first in boot order

Save and Exit

Then try

[Killen]

It sounds like your boot sequence was corrupted and reset after your saved settings.

Though I can not speak to this specific problem, I can attest to problems on my BIOS that acted similar to yours. While I was running my mobo for the first time, I lost all video from my GPU after about my 5th boot up in Win XP SP2c. I even tried a new gpu with no change in the system. Out of desperation I removed the battery for the BIOS, left the unit alone for 5 minutes and tried it again. Fortunately the video came back and I was in business.

Later that week I went to ASUS' news group for my mobo and fount the same problem had been reported before. (Wish I had known that before hand!)

Apparently sometimes some of the BIOS code can become corrupted and stop functioning. Sometimes saving settings will correct the problem, sometimes removal of the battery and forcing a clean bios does the trick. Sometimes the BIOS has to go back to the factory for a reprogramming. Be happy, it works. If you want to know more, I would suggest visiting news groups that deal with your mobo. I am sure ASUS has such groups for you to see. Their should be more on the Internet, perhaps a search on Yahoo will give you more than you care to look at.

[T.J.]

Is there a log of the failed boot sequence somewhere in the PC? When BIOS is loading, the American Megatrends logo appears, and
the steps are shown on the screen as they are executed. but when I was getting that boot error, there were messages that flew by too quickly to read, then the final error page appeared and the sequence halted. the question is: how can I slow the steps down or allow me to manually step through them?