Question Hard drive not being recognized in bios

[topsyturvy]

I have a desktop computer, it is a Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2200 2.2ghz.
The hard drive is a sata drive. The bios does not recoqnize the hard drive. What settings should I look for in the bios? Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you.

 

[rickypicky5]

Did you just acquire this PC? Have you opened up the case to verify the SATA drive has both a:

1. Power connection from it to the PSU, and a
2. SATA cable connected from it to the motherboard?

 

[BFG-9000]

Have you considered that a 16yo hard drive might just be dead? After all, it's one of the few things in a computer with moving parts.

 

[topsyturvy]

It is a Sata drive, connections are correct. Tried another known working sata drive and it still does not recognize the drive and the DVD rom is not being recognized in the bios either.

 

[BFG-9000]

Well the SATA ports could just be dead. Usually an E2200 was paired with very low-end chipsets like ICH7 that didn't support AHCI at all, so the only real SATA options in the BIOS would be Compatible (which would be ATA100 mode) or Enhanced (SATA300 mode without AHCI).

On the bright side ICH7 was also the last to natively support IDE so you may have an IDE header directly attached to the chipset and not going through something like a JMicron JMB363 chip

What motherboard do you have?

 

[topsyturvy]

The motherboard is an ASRock G31M-S. I did try the compatible and enhanced settings. I am not sure if I saved the settings change and restarted the computer. I did see an idea header on the motherboard.

 

[BFG-9000]

Did you try all 4 ports?

I don't see any settings for SATA in the manual but it is clearly possible to misconfigure IDE so perhaps worth trying a CMOS CLR or Load BIOS Defaults (it's under "Smart" in the BIOS)

There are PCI or PCIe SATA expansion cards available, which may be cheaper than finding IDE HDD and optical drives. Though PCI would be limited to 133MB/s and PCIe x1 250MB/s as that's PCIe v1.1, so either option would be slower than the native ports. But they would be bootable so long as the card has an option ROM--the BIOS would see that as an "AddOn ROM" SCSI device in the boot order.

 

[Bob.B]

The motherboard is an ASRock G31M-S. I did try the compatible and enhanced settings. I am not sure if I saved the settings change and restarted the computer. I did see an idea header on the motherboard.

Try a different sata port on the mobo.

Try different data and power cables.

 

[topsyturvy]

I will try all these suggestions. Thank you to all and will let you know the results.

 

[topsyturvy]

Would you believe that the data cables to the hard drive and the DVD rom drive were both faulty. I never even thought that both would be faulty. I took a spare data cable that I had plugged it in the mother board and hard drive and voila, booted up fine. Thank you all for the info. Not as smart as I used to be after recovering from a stroke.