HD Doctor Blog

There are 6 main reasons why a system BIOS will not detect the presence of an internal hard drive.  Here is a list of them.  They are not in any particular order, but you can follow these steps one by one to troubleshoot this problem:

• Incorrect jumper settings on the drive
• Drive is not spinning up
• Faulty or Unplugged Data Cable
• The Serial ATA motherboard drivers are not properly loaded
• Hard disk drive not enabled in the BIOS

After verifying that your ATA or SATA port is set to Auto-Detect or is enabled,…

Reason 2: Incorrect jumper settings on the drive

Serial ATA:  If you have a 3.0 Gbit/sec SATA drive that is not being detected by your 1.5 Gbit/sec SATA controller, or it causes your system to lock up when connected to a 1.5 Gbit/sec SATA controller, you may need to jumper your 3.0 Gbit/sec SATA drive to the slower speed of 1.5 Gbit/sec for the system to recognize it properly.

Jumper settings for Seagate SATA drives

Jumper settings for Maxtor-brand SATA drives

ATA:  It is recommended that all Seagate ATA hard discs supporting the…

Reason 3: Drive is not spinning up

If the drive is not receiving power or receiving an incorrect level of power, it will not spin up. To check to see if this is the cause of the BIOS not detecting the hard drive, follow these steps:

1. Power off the computer.
2. Open the computer case and remove the data cable from the hard drive. This will stop any power saving commands from being sent.
3. Turn on the system. Check to see if the hard drive is spinning. If you touch the side of the drive you

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Reason 4: Faulty or Unplugged Data Cable

Always inspect the motherboard and hard disc connections for bent or misaligned pins. Folding, crimping, pinching, or creasing data cables can cause the wires to break inside the insulation, leaving the exterior of the cable looking normal. When in doubt of data cable condition, replace it.

For SATA cables, Seagate recommends using cables shorter than 39.37 inches (1 meter).

Here are some images of Serial ATA cables.

The BIOS will not detect a hard disc if the data cable is damaged or the connection is incorrect.

Reason 5: The Serial ATA motherboard drivers are not properly loaded (especially in Windows XP/2000)

When you install Windows XP/2000 on a drive that will be the boot drive (ie, the C: drive), when it comes time to install Windows, the drive may not be detected.  Here is the proper procedure:

1. Insert the Windows XP/2000 CD/DVD into the CD/DVD drive.
2. Power down the computer.
3. Mount and connect the Serial ATA hard drive.
4. See here for an interactive flash tutorial illustrating this.
5. Power up the computer.

6. For some add-in SATA controller cards, you

…

Reason 6: Hard disk drive not enabled in the BIOS

Most personal computers display a brief message about entering System Setup soon after the power is turned on.  System Setup is also called the "System BIOS" or sometimes the "CMOS Setup" – each is a name for the same thing.

For example, on Dell systems you will see "F2=Setup" in the upper right hand corner during the computer boot-up.  This means to press the F2 key to enter Setup (the BIOS).   Different computer manufactures have different methods to enter Setup, so please check your system documentation for specifics. How to…

Just like the old boot floppy diskettes, CD or DVD-ROM discs can boot to a DOS or other operating systems.  Just copying files to the CD will not work because the CD will need a master boot record and other hidden Startup operating system files.  Instead, the preferred method is to create a single file, an image of a bootable CD, called an ISO image.  Most CD-ROM burning applications recognize this type of image file.  Once the ISO file is burned as an image, then the new CD is a clone of the original and bootable. Besides the bootable…

If you just want to start your data recovery business, hope this article will bring some inspiration to you. Here I recommend 5 useful tools to you. These tools can give big help to your recovery business:

1. In many cases, when we received the hard disks from our clients, we found the hard disks had damaged. Most of the performance is firmware corruption, so you should repair the firmware to recovery the data.  Now you need a professional tool. I recommend the most popular tool – PC3000 System.

2. Disk Imaging tool. When we receive the…

As we know, firmware damage is the main reason which causes the hard disk data lose. When we encounter this problem, we should rebuild the firmware first. By this time, we need some professional tools, such as PC3000. (About the PC3000 tool). With the professional tools, we also need to find the matching firmware, so I made this searching tool as below:

You just need to input your firmware model number, for example: input ‘HitachiHTS541616J9AT00’, then you can find the firmware which you are looking for. Although this searching tool is not perfect, its accuracy rating is good. …

Apr. 21, 2010 – WD introduced WD Photos photo viewer, an iPhone/iPod Touch app for use with its My Book World Edition and WD ShareSpace network drives, that lets users access up to 250,000 of their favorite photos from anywhere in the world.

The WD Photos photo viewer app allows users to easily log in to their drive from anywhere so they can view their entire photo library.

Users’ photos remain private, safe and secure in full high-resolution format, on their network drive, eliminating the need for painstaking uploads to costly online photo services and the need…