Sager 9750/ Clevo d9k,d900k no longer recognizes internal hard drive.

If anyone has any info/insight as to why my 2 d9k's can't find the internal hard drive(s) please enlighten me.
They worked fine a month or so ago.

They will boot to bios but that's about it.

If I put the hard drive (80GB Fujitsu, windows XP) in an enclosure and hook it up USB, the bios says yes, there is a hard drive there.

If I mount it internally (either top or bottom) the bios says hard drive?, what hard drive?

one has 2GB ram, the other has 1 GB
one cpu is 4800, the other is 4400

I can try to get the bios version if that matters

 

Do you get something like " No operating system found."? Or is it such that even a bootable usb drive can't see the drive? Also, what are the SATA settings in the bios and does it keep any changes you make to it?

Ticking off those questions could narrow the issue down:

• corrupt boot loader; can fix that using Windows PE
• failed drive; might recover by writing full image and copy back to replacement drive
• cmos battery worn out; replace battery

 

The hard drives themselves are fine, work well in the third 9750 that I have.
The CMOS battery on the problem computers
read 3 point something volts on the multimeter.
If I make changes in the bios, they are saved.

I have tried multiple hard drives on the two problem machines.
On each one, if I put 1 or more hard drives internal,
when I start up the computer and hit F2 to get into BIOS, on the first
screen it lists my 2 optical drives but none of the hard drives
and yes if I try to boot it says “Operating system not found”
Hard drives are also not listed when the computer is POSTing,
just the 2 optical drives.

If I boot the computer from a ‘Bart PE’ CD or a runtime live CD, they can’t
find any internal hard drives either.

If I put hard drives in a USB enclosure they are listed during POST
and are listed in BIOS.

The computers are oldish (2006 or so) and the
BIOS are somewhat simple, the only SATA option is RAID enable/disable.

 

Tried a bios reset? A corrupted boot sector can happen out-of-the-blue, but not on multiple at drives at once ... Mind that if the bios says ' no drive on SATA port' that it doesn't mean the hdd is not accessible to the OS either. Try to run PE while the drive can be accessed via USB and use the 'boot sector repair' function.

 

Try backing a drive up, formatting it and see if it is detected in the BIOS. If not then perhaps some electrical surge hit both and damaged them.

 

I am now even more confused.
The hard drives that I have tested in my 2 problem d9k work perfectly fine in my third d9k.

Will formatting it really make it work better?

 

We're the both plugged in next to each 9th er when the issues started? I'm suspecting the sata controller channels are fried in both.

 

The problems started when I wanted to clone my WINXP C-Drive on the main d9k that I use all the time (with a not quite standard partition table.)

I put the three d9k's next to each other on the table.
I would try to clone the drive and then put it into one of the other computers to see if it would boot.

At first I got some non working clones but the 2 now problem d9k's would at least recognize the internal hard drive. After a few attempts some of which involved using a
Samsung 128GB EVO Pro SSD, that's when I started to have problems.

Now, only the original d9k still recognizes internal drives as long as they are not the SSD
(which it would recognize internally when I started this process but not now)

Maybe I fried something?

I can strip the laptops down to the motherboard but software is NOT my specialty.
(It took 4 tries to figure out that the HAL.dll error was because boot.ini was pointing to the wrong partition and I still can't get a USB XP to boot)

 

Backup one, format it and fresh install to rule out weird software issues you may have created. Do this with only one hdd in the system. This goes for installing the os too.