Mobo not seeing hard drives anymore :(

[jonny440]

Hello....I'm hoping someone can help me here...

I've come home this evening and turned on my pc to be greeted with the P5B logo screen for about 30 seconds, then the message bootmng is missing. After trying to boot again with no joy I enter the bios and see that the mobo is not detecting any hard drives.

I have two sata drives connected, the main boot drive to sata 1 and a storage drive to sata 2. The mobo can see neither.

I have tried the following, all to no avail:

resetting the bios,
a new battery for the mobo,
disconnecting the storage drive,
swapping sata lead for a new one,
using a different rail from the psu,
using a different sata ports on the mobo.

Other aspects of the bios are fine. For example, it can see the ram and cpu no problem. It just can't see any hdd's connected.

I would try the drives in a second machine, but I don't have access to a 2nd machine that takes sata drives. But it strikes me as highly unlikely that two drives fail at the same time?

My mobo is a Asus P5B, and has been working flawlessly for a few years. I've been running W7 for the past month with no problems, and installed a HD4870 two weeks ago that has been running fine.

Can anyone suggest anything?

[DataMatrix]

Do you mean it says bootmgr is missing?

If you're getting that far then I don't see how the BIOS is not seeing the drives. It could be a possibility that a virus has rewritten the drive's firmware.

[jonny440]

It did say that the first time I booted it up today. I wasn't paying attention to the boot process. Just noticed the message when I looked back at the screen. When I tried again I was getting to the bios, then a 30 second wait, then the missing bootmng message.

When I try booting now (after I have tried resetting the bios) the cpu, ram and the usb mouse are recognized, then there is a wait of so seconds or so, then I get the message reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key

[jonny440]

Ok, just tried again. Some progress.

I think after my pc failed to boot the first time, the first thing I did was to remove the storage disk (really can't be losing all that. All my gf's photos backed up on there but not yet written back) and then assumed the bios wasn't seeing either of them.

I have now reconnected the storage drive and the mobo does see that on sata ports 1 and 2. But when I try the same with my primary drive I get nothing.

I guess that pretty much proves it's the drive, yes?

It's a Seagate Barracuda 500gb, pretty sure less than a year old

Could it be anything else, or does this prove the drive is dead? Would like to be as sure as I can before I chase up the warranty.

Thanks

[Zak33]

can you try that boot drive in another PC as a slave drive (ie make sure the other PC boots off it's own drive) to see if that drive is working?

[jonny440]

can you try that boot drive in another PC as a slave drive (ie make sure the other PC boots off it's own drive) to see if that drive is working?

I've tried both my hard drives in a second computer I have that I remembered is sata (a small form factor HP DC7100.... pretty basic). The storage drive is fine.

The drive I'm having trouble with is not detected at all. In fact I can't even get to the bios, or to the boot select screen when that drive is plugged in.

I can feel that the platters are spinning up, so power is getting to the drive. but nothing other than that.

Any suggestions I can try?

There's quite a lot of stuff on that drive that I'm quite gutted about losing even though the really important stuff is on my storage drive.

Also, when getting a drive replaced under warranty am I expected to send off a drive full of my personnal information?