SATA HDD not recognized by BIOS after Windows 7 reinstall

Question

I got Win32.Virut.56 virus, which is a very nasty stuff. I reinstalled my Win7, but it reappeared somehow. After hours of headache, I was able to remove it by booting into a live Ubuntu and running CureIT using Wine.

I then started reinstalling Windows 7. After the "expanding files" stage it rebooted, however from that point on, my 160 GB Western Digital SATAII hard drive was not recognized. The bios just freezes at "SATAII 1: Detecting...".

My other 1.5 TB Seagate SATAII hard drive works correctly.

I tried switching cables; that didn't help. I googled this issue, but what came up were usually firmware problems. I can't update the firmware or do anything at all, because if I plug it in, it won't start.

My motherboard is an ASRock 4Core1333-Viiv, if that helps.

I'm now stuck on a live Ubuntu. I can't install Win7 on the 1.5 TB drive, because it's full of data I need.

What do you think I could try to make the hdd work again?

As for the moment, I don't have another computer to try if that one recognizes the hdd.

Answer 1

It sounds like a bad hard drive unfortunately. Doing hard drive intensive work like backups, reinstalls, and virus scans are sometimes just enough to take a dying hard drive over the edge. You can try hooking the drive up to a SATA to USB converter and seeing if you can access the drive from there. You could see if you can get another computers BIOS to recognize the drive. I don't have much hope for it though.

On a side note, I've seen this symptom happen on older motherboards that only support SATA1 at 1.5 gb/s as apposed to 3 gb/s. Some hard drives have a jumper setting that forces it down to 1.5, which fixes that particular issue. Your motherboard supports SATAII so this probably would not fix it.

Answer 2

Check all the cables, jumpers, memory, try booting with the bare minimum hardware needed, reset the BIOS and check the SATA related settings and see if that helps. If it doesn't your hard drive might be defect and indeed, trying another computer can confirm that... Don't forget to configure the BIOS right when the problem is gone!

Answer 3

As for the moment, I don't have another computer to try if that one recognizes the hdd.

Have you tried mounting the drive in an external (USB?) enclosure. While this would not allow you to install Windows to the drive you could at least see if you could access it and provide an indication if the problem is with your BIOS or the drive.

The only other thought I have is to reset the BIOS and try using the BIOS default settings. (I prefer doing this by removing the battery from the motherboard for a few minutes, but to each their own.) But perhaps you have already tried this.

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I've tried external enclosure, that didn't work either. At least Ubuntu couldn't recognize it, but then again, ... the file system could be damaged ...

Have you tried the "hard reset" of your BIOS suggested above?

It's not clear to me what you meant by "Ubuntu couldn't recognize it".

Did you open Disk Utility (System > Administration > Disk Utility on my Ubuntu install) to see if the drive was present but just had no "usable" partitions?

Did you get USB errors when you connected the external drive? Did you look through the system logs (System > Administration > Log File Viewer) for any messages indicating why the external drive did not attach?