Hmm,vey intersting. A neighbor called me a couple weeks ago with nearly
identical problem on a 1 year old Compaq. First call it turned out to be a bad
hard drive. She had a compaq tech come over and replace it.
Second call a week or so later I go over and no IDE drives are being detected
in the BIOS. I tell her to call compaq again and tell them her motherboard is
bad.Sure enough they come out again and tell her they need to replace the mobo
now. Pretty sure she had a poweer surge during a reallly bad lightning storm
here in Fla.

Dell Dimension 8200, p4, rambus ram...good machine

Customer had cd-rom go bad, called in his 3-year parts and labor, and a tech
came out installed new cd drive....


Computer ran fine for 12 hours...Shut down, upon boot-up windows xp went
into checkdisk, then did a "memory dump", and shut down....

So then the computer would not recognize any ide devices, cd-rom's or
harddrives....

I figure mobo is hosed (ide controller), so I call dell....I did say its
possible all ide devices are fried.....


How can all ide devices get fried like that? Any tricks to getting this hard
drive to work to get the data?