Member Avatar for neonik

After my windows totally crashed i thought it might be time to format my hard drive, taking it out of my computer and placing it in a friends i pulled off all the flies that i needed to keep. after putting it back into my computer i attempted to format it through the windows boot disk but i have no clue if it worked or not because when i went to install windows it said a windows directory was already present but the system said that the hard drive was completely empty (i only have the one drive). after restarting the computer it said that now my DVD drive was Master 0 and it could not dectect any hard disks. i went into BIOS and my hard disk is under Master 3 instead of 0. now when trying to install windows, windows says it cannot not detect any hard drives.

PLZ HELP!!!!

my hard disk is SATA Seagate Barracuda 160 gb

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Short checklist and practical steps to follow next. After the exchange between and , concentrate on BIOS port mapping and controller configuration, cabling/power, and whether the Windows installer has the right storage drivers — these are the usual causes when a SATA disk appears to move around or vanishes from setup.

  • Physically: reseat the SATA data and power cables, try a different data cable and a different motherboard SATA port, and confirm the PSU connector is supplying power.
  • BIOS: look for a SATA or storage configuration page, run an automatic port/disk detect, and check the hard-disk boot priority (port numbering can differ from the board silk-screen). If the controller mode is set to AHCI or RAID and the Windows installer is an older build, temporarily switch to a compatibility/IDE mode or supply the controller driver during setup.
  • Diagnostics: boot a utility USB (Ubuntu/GParted or a vendor tool) to confirm the drive model and SMART status. From a Linux live session sudo fdisk -l or smartctl -a /dev/sda will show whether the disk is visible and healthy.
  • If the drive is visible but partitions look wrong, use TestDisk to inspect and recover the partition table before reinstalling Windows. If the installer still does not see any disks, supply the correct storage driver for the controller or consider updating the motherboard BIOS as a last resort.

Useful tools: SeaTools (Seagate diagnostics) and TestDisk partition recovery. Back up any recoverable data before writing changes.

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Member Avatar for jbennet

When you put your hdd in your friends pc you would most likely have had to change the jumper settings to get it to work. Check them.

Member Avatar for neonik

how do i check them?

my motherboard has 4 SATA slots and when i plug into each one it changes the posistion of the Master for the hard disk(when i move the cable down one slot it changes to master 2 and down again it goes to master 4), the closest i can get is 2. I think that my BIOS thinks my motherboard has 5/6 slots instead of 4

Member Avatar for dcc

There are no jumpers for master or slave on SATA drives.

Is the hdd seen in the device manager?

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