Bios or boot menu won't recognize my harddrive

[l6iudiciani]

I installed a nividia 465 graphics card into my computer today. When I go to boot my computer starts from the cd-rom(second priority). I go to the boot menu to change the priorities so it can start from the hard drive, however neither bios or the boot menu recognizes any hard drive, or reads bootable add-in. Everything appears to be wired fine, and I hope my hard drive didn't somehow fry during the card installation. Can anyone give me further insight into why my comp isn't recognizing my hard drive? Additionally, when I first installed the card I forgot to plug in the power wire to the hard drive, so after I started it I initially realized that so I opened the case again to plug it back in. Could that initial start with the hard drive power wire unconnected make the comp bypass recognizing it in other start-ups? Please Help!!

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hello,

The BIOS may not have ID's the HDD when you have the HDD power cable disconnected. That won't hurt the HDD, it just isn't recognized during Phase 1 (System Confituration) of the startUp process.

What is the model # or your motherboard and how do you have your System HDD connected?

Your new video card must be working or you couldn't get to the splash screen and then clicked <del> to enter the BIOS setup.
Do you get a single beep code after the BIOS initializes all the hardware and before it trys to find the MBR on the system HDD?

Disconnect and reconnect both the HDD power cable and data cable for completeness. If that doesn't clear it up, I'd reset the BIOS to it's default settings and let the BIOS detect all the hdw a fresh.

You might write down any BIOS config settings you specifically set, so as to reenable them after resetting the BIOS.

 

[l6iudiciani]

Best answer selected by l6iudiciani.