Hard drives suddenly inaccessible

[Bluecube]

Was working on my PC last night trying out a live Linux distro. Everything was going fine, installed the distro to a USB pen drive and rebooted in order to check the install was working. As the BIOS flashed up I thought the two hard drives I have installed were missing but no, they were detected by the AHCI setup. Chose to boot from the pen drive to no avail. It happens sometimes with Linux installs so thought I'd just try again so rebooted to go back to Windows. Nada. Nothing. When I go into the BIOS the hard drives aren't shown as being detected (perhaps as they're SATA drives and the BIOS lists IDE) so I'm a bit stumped. What's happened, why and more importantly, how can I fix it?

An interesting aside is that I can't even boot from a live CD anymore.

[g8ina]

Id start by clearing the CM<OS and taking the battery out (or vice versa)... Start the BIOS again from scratch.

ps - must have a go at your books sometime soon .. looks fascinating !

[bluepumpkin]

I had almost the exact issue you describe. The suggestion from the previous poster (reset CMOS) should fix it. When I had this problem I just tried changing the AHCI settings in the bios and eventually after rebooting on each different value there were picked up again.

If you have more than one SATA controller on your motherboard you could also try using the other, I have had many issue when trying to use any 3rd party controllers on various motherboards suddenly stops working

[killermillergb]

If you cannot access the file on the hard drive though anoother computer most likly you need to reformat it with linkus. Saved my back side many times