Did you use the same IDE cable in the other boxes? If not, it might be the
cable.

Otherwise, try moving the hard drive to a different power supply connector,
I'd also check all drive power supply leads for proper voltage levels. I
prefer to check the voltage levels when a drive is not plugged into the
power supply.

Between the black (ground) and yellow, it should read 12 Volts positive.
Between the black (ground) and red, it should read 5 Volts positive.

You could also try moving the hard drive to the secondary controller, or an
IDE controller card in the PCI slot.

Good luck, report back and let us know what fixed it.

Mike in Houston Sent at 1333 Central time

"Jon Pumfleet" wrote in message
om...
This ageing PC stopped seeing it's existing Bigfoot HDD after I'd been
under the hood upgrading memory. I've reseated all the connections
and still it will not see, or boot from, the HDD. I can't run CPQ
diagnostics as the compaq partition got destroyed a long time ago.
The bigfoot drive works fine in other machines. I've backed out the
memory upgrade with no effect.

I have a little utility "ide.exe" which detects connected devices, and
it tells me no devices are attached. I've tried several drives which
I know to be OK.

What's going on? Disk controller failure? Mboard? Don't understand
why it would give up slowly (seemed to work 1 time in 10, then a week
later, not at all....)

Thanks for any help anyone!