New PC build bombed out.........

[ABSYNTHEMINDED]

Just spent a week building and tweaking out a "new" PC and over nite it must have crashed (no power this AM). Now when I power it on, it can't "see" my HDD's and load my OS. They show up in the BIOS, but everytime I reboot it says "no disk drive found" or "no hard drive detected"

Here's what I have

Antec 900 gaming case
Antec 550W pwr supply
Asus P5Q Pro Mobo
Zalman CNPS9700
Intel E8400 Core Duo (Wolfdale)
OCZ DDR2 1066 (2-2 GB sticks)
2-Seagate 250 GB HDDs
ATI Radeon HD 4870
Creative SB X-Fi
Win XP Pro 32 bit SP3

May sound strange, but I bought this build 2-3 years ago, and just decided to build it two weeks ago. Yes, everything just came out of their original boxes 2 weeks ago.

It ran fine all week while I was loading and tweaking out all the software and updates, drivers, everything. It was a very clean load, zero warnings or errors in the OS and no conflicts or incompatibility issues. I was about to burn/ghost a backup image to DVDs.

Haven't tried to OC or tweak anything yet. It was running completely stock.
Everything seems to be getting power and appears normal. It's like the SATA controllers just died. I even tried reinstalling the OS, XP setup "sees" the HDDs but when I start the load, it bombs out. Tried both HDDs and the remaining SATA slots on the MoBo - nada, zilch

Just want some advice on what else I can try.

Thanks
Absyntheminded

 

[PolePosition]

I'm thinking you might need a new HDD from those sitting around so long and not getting used.

 

[ABSYNTHEMINDED]

That crossed my mind, but both of the HDDs buying the farm at the same time? I have a 160GB I can mount in there and see if I can load the OS on, just wanted to check here and get as many fix ideas first.

Thanks

 

[PolePosition]

I just don't know what the shelf life on an unused HDD would be but I assume you bought them both at the same time and perhaps they initially worked but the mechanical arms might have corroded from sitting still. As you say, all else works. Drives can be a bit tricky. Not only, they are magnetic like tape, which I know when I tried to record media on a brand new cassette tape that was a few years old one time the recording came out with static or not good at all.

 

[verbatim]

Swap in a new hdd seems the right idea.

 

[Conumdrum]

Got one power cable from the PSU to both HDDs? Might be loose. When you turn it on can you hear any noise from the HD? They make noise on bootup if detected or not.

 

[verbatim]

You hear the noise if they spin up, not if they are detected. We think the issue is them not spinning up as the arms may be stuck from sitting still for years.
So they would be detected by bios but then do nothing else.

 

[Conumdrum]

Possibly. He needs a diff HD to test I guess.

Ahh well, another odd one for the books.

 

[ABSYNTHEMINDED]

Thanks for the ideas...

Went with the simplest troubleshoot first... pulled the two 250 GB HDDs out and put an equally old 160 GB in. My XP Pro w/slipstreamed SP2 loaded on it fine and I'm back in biz. Just for S's and G's I wired up the 250's and although I had formatted them previously (NTFS) it was like they were completely empty unformatted drives, that still wouldn't let me load XP on them. I have them running as data storage now and they work fine....Go figure

Thanks for the assist all.

 

[INFINITeXpRESS]

Went with the simplest troubleshoot first... pulled the two 250 GB HDDs out and put an equally old 160 GB in. My XP Pro w/slipstreamed SP2 loaded on it fine and I'm back in biz. Just for S's and G's I wired up the 250's and although I had formatted them previously (NTFS) it was like they were completely empty unformatted drives, that still wouldn't let me load XP on them. I have them running as data storage now and they work fine....Go figure

Thanks for the assist all.

That sounds really odd, but as long as it is working now I guess that's all that matters at this point. I guess you really don't want to screw up a good thing right now!

 

[PolePosition]

When you did the format, I would be curious to know if you did the "quick format" or the long format by unchecking the box. Quick format skips over what might be huge clusters of bad sectors where simple data packs can be stored, but the drive isn't suitable for optimized OS drive. I'd be a little skeptical, since it might write data for storage but yet in the event you need to retrieve that data, it show up lost or "can't find". You might want to test writing and retrieving a few times before trusting it with data storage.