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A Busman’s Holiday to Invisible Hard Disk Land

Posted in Home, Freecycle, Blogs on January 7, 2009 at 3:51 pm

Here we are all back to work in a new year - and if that sounds bad remember there are quite few not back to work as they no longer have jobs to go back to

I hope you had a good break - I did in the main but like a fool I had myself a bit of a busman’s holiday after Christmas. I decided to fix the two old computers laying around the house. (OK, two OF the old computers laying around the house.) One is a p3 600 which I thought I’d setup with Linux and freecycle. The other a p4 1.8G - no HD or memory - which I thought I’d fix up for my son. Of course the p4 was in a desktop case & the p3 in a nice tower so I needed to swap them…

I actually setup the p3 with Linux and after a bit of fiddling it seems to work using two old 5G disks (which I sanitized as discussed back http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/06/20/hard-disk-sanitation-for-recycyling/). However, it was still in the tower case but at least I knew it was working. Like a double fool I never checked the p4 - it had no disks in anyway. But now I’m not sure if I’ve bust it or if it wasn’t working before…

The swap was a bit fiddly (for me), I had to swap power supplies too, change motherboard fixing points, work out where the reset button / leds went and finally install a couple of old hard disks. There in lies my problem. I have a DVD, a CD and two HDD’s. None of the HHD’s are recognised if I connect up either of the CD/DVD. Well they are, but only after a soft reset (CTRL-ALT-DEL or reset button).

Is my power supply not good enough? I’ve set pre-disk delays, I’ve swapped master/slave, primary/secondary but the BIOS just doesn’t see the HDD’s until a soft reboot. At the moment I have a single DVD drive and a single HDD and if I CTRL-ALT-DEL after it says there is nothing to boot from then it runs fine.

Any ideas???