SATA HDD not detected but DVD drive detected

[shadowofamirage]

What's up guys. I'm having some seriously annoying problems with my pc. I had 3 HDDs connected initially. Worked for about 3 days flawlessly and one day after shutting down normally I get the BCD error in boot. So I go to the BIOS to see that one of my HDDs stopped working. I disconnect that one and the remaining two work fine for 3 days on a new OS only for one of them to fail after 3 days. So I tried switching the connections, flipping the RAMs and stuff to no luck.

Bare in mind none of my SATA ports now detect HDDs but one of them detects my DVD-RW Drive. When I use the SATA cable on the dvd drive to the HDD nothing at all is detected. Please help me out. This is very annoying. Windows installation starts up but shows no HDDs available for install. So I guess the rest of my hardware is cool, except for the HDDs.

it suddenly stopped working.
By the way, I got my friend's pc to my place and installed my HDDs on it. Initially also I had to play with the SATA and power cable combinations to get a config that would detect all.

mobo: MSI G41M-P33 combo
cpu: Core 2 Quad @2.33ghz
ram: 4gb DDR2
gpu: radeon hd6670

thank you for the long read, I didn't see how I could make it shorter since this problem is so absurd. Any help appreciated.

 

[techgeek]

What drives do you have? Are all three new and the same drive?

 

[Shaun o]

You never stated what power supply you were using.
But if you say the drives worked and were detected in a friends system.
And they had no problems in being seen.

Then I would suspect depending on how old the system is or Psu in it.
The psu is starting to become unstable, and not giving the required voltage and amp to drive the extra hardware.

If the drives were still connected in the right order via the sata cables and power,
One was removed to it not being detected, and then another one exhibited the exact same symptoms 3 days later.

Then it can be a sign of the Psu beginning to fail in power output.
Psu`s don`t always stop working with no notice, but often start to degrade with power output.

If both the drives work fine in your friends system then it can be the cause.

I don`t know how your three hard drives were set up in the bios.
But if two of them were set to raid mode.
It is why when you tested a Dvd drive on the Sata port that had a hard drive connected it was not detected, or shown in the bios.

Minimum setting for a raid array requires two hard drives Raid 0.

You should check in your bios if raid was setup on particular sata ports.
And test them without raid enabled on the Sata ports.

Just a thought.

 

[shadowofamirage]

PSU is iBall Sprinter 600

I have no idea about RAID. Could you please brief me on that and how to go about changing it in the BIOS?
my bios: CMOS Srtup Utility (c) 1985-2010, American megatrends Inc.
BIOS version v32.7

 

[shadowofamirage]

And OMG there is a certain order that needs to be followed when connecting satas and power supply cables? I tried out random combinations and used the one that worked. Please tell me how to go about it