Seems complicated, but I'll try my best to explain. I was having some overheating problems, so I opened up the PC, sucked out the dust and rearranged my SATA and Power cables. Then when I booted my PC up, my BIOS HD Detection gave me a message of "No hard drives", yet the Windows XP boot screen came up. Strange, anyway, I logged into XP and noticed a few of my programs were missing icons. Upon further inspection, my E: drive was missing. I reopened the PC and tried fooling around with settings, making it a master to the D: drive on my secondary EIDE channel, and I'm still doing this to no avail. Any suggestions?

Recommended Answers

All 2 Replies

I don't know if it is recomended to vaccum off dust inside a computer.
You have to be very careful with electrostatic discharge from your body and/or the brush you use to wipe out the dust. ESD can damage the electronic components inside your computer and you'll never know.

I'm guessing you have 2 drives: C: and D: on the SATA drive and E: on a regular IDE drive. Is that right?

Well, to be sure that no hard drive has conked off, you could try plugging in the drives one at a time and see if the drives are working. If they are, your cable is at fault.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.