PCTech Forums

I have two hard drives which can not be recognized by the BIOS. Tried using repair programs but if the drive is not there I can't repair.

How did this happen? The drives were used in a removable tray and I did not realize there were bad contact connections to the drive and it messed up the MBR.

Is there any way to repair an "invisible hard drive"? Can I force the BIOS to find the drive?

Thanks for any help.

I hate to tell you this but......

There's no way, that i am aware, of to repair a drive without bios recognizing it.

Connect only one drive and try to see if the bios can see it. its quite rare to have two bad hard drives at once.

If they are configured wrong, like both being set to master, you won't see either. IF you boot them up singly, make sure to configure them a single and not master.

You didn't mention how old the Motherboard is. If its an oldie and can only see 8 gig or less in the bios, just one oversize drive can choke the bios so it sees neither one.

Also one bad drive can make the other one seem to be bad.

A Dell cable select IDE cable can mess things up (it will have a rectangular hole punched in the cable.)

You need to do a little more testing. The MBR is another issue and has nothing to do with the bios seeing the drive. There are programs called 'drive overlays' that allow an older motherboard to see beyond two gig. Fiddle with the MBR on a hard drive with an overlay, and you will loose all of your data on the drive.

Hope this is of some help to you