Disappearing G51 hard drive

So...

While attemping (in vain) to get my QX9300 to work, I noticed my second hard drive has disappeared. It's not showing up in HWMonitor, Disk Management, HWTune, or My Computer. Before this it was running like a charm.

The only thing I did inside there was swap out my processors and replace the stock one once I determined that my new CPU wasn't going to work. I took the regular precautions of being careful and removing the battery and AC power. Prior to this post, I opened the computer back up and reseated the hard drive to make sure I hadn't knocked it loose.

 

do this:

1. take out hard drive 1 and hard drive 2
2. place hard drive 1 in slot 2
3. boot computer into bios and see if it shows up in bios
4. shutdown and replace drives in original slots

this is what i had to do to get my 2nd hdd to show up after bios flash

 

Well, this is bizarre.

I power down, open up, and remove both hard drives. I install the stock HDD (with the OS files on it) in the second HDD slot. It is detected in BIOS. I exit BIOS and boot up Vista with the stock drive still in the secondary slot. After entering my desktop, Vista informs me that drivers are being installed. After a moment whatever device I have plugged in is ready to use.

I power down again, and replace my drives, with the stock going in the primary slot and the second HDD going into the secondary slot. In BIOS both hard disks are detected. However, back in Vista, I cannot detect the second hard drive with any software.

 

try going into component manager in control panel.

control panel>admin tools>computer management

try searching for it there

 

Neither Device Mananger nor Disk Management detect it.


And I don't know if this is related or not, but my computer enters POST twice. I'll hit the power, POST appears. A few seconds later the screen goes dark, and POST appears again. After this second time Vista boots normally.

 

Ignore.

Problem fixed. Using good pal Google, I found a fix.

I think I had accidentally "load manufacture defaults" in BIOS, resulting in my phantom hard drive and double POSTs.

I enter BIOS, loaded user defaults, save and exit, entered BIOS again, and repeated. After I saved and exited, I only POSTed once, and I see my HDD again.

By the way, the fix was found on some thread here, posted by Ken.

EDIT: This isn't the thread I saw, but it provided a fix anyway.

 

nice find, good to know that fix

 

Phew, I'm glad I found this thread! I was just about to send my G51 away for repair. This is an infuriating problem.

Hopefully Asus release a BIOS update that stops this from happening. It wasted about 12 hours of my time.

 

Forge, going offtopic here but since u couldn't get your 9300 to work you should sell it to me, but since I'm on a budget you should hold it for me on lay-away until prices go down abit in any case send me a pm if selling it is something ur thinking about

 

His QX9300 is long gone. Besides, if you tried to buy it, I would offer a higher price for it.

 

Holy necromancy batman.