What happenned to my mobo? Frazzeled IDE controller

[richard8654]

I'm just curious about what the heck happened. My IDE HDD is in drawer with a caddy. Not uncommonly, the PC does not boot, and what I have to do, is remove caddy and then put in again. The other day the PC did not boot, so I did the usual thing. And this time - smoke. I looked inside PC and see some power wiring insulation melt. And small spot on IDE cable shows copper. So, I tape things up and try again. PC booted up. Indeed I transferred some files to flash drive. But now PC does not recognize any drive I have. IDE controller must be shot. I just don't get it why I had a short in the first place.

 

[richard8654]

The IDE controller must be shot. It looks like 12V or 5v got onto the wire on the edge on the IDE cable, the one marked red. BIOS reports an IDE controller on start-up, but BIOS cannot recognize any HDD I have. I ordered a new mobo (Gigabyte 965P DS3). Not expensive.

EDIT1: Actually, the IDE controller is working, but I've still got a problem. Driving me nuts.

I've changed the CMOS battery, because the one in was showing a bit low on voltage. Then, I've successfully flashed BIOS with the latest version (F14).

Okay, I've managed to install XP on a HDD. I added a few programs, like Easus and Firefox. I ran Easus just to see what it showed.

(Point of interest: Easus shows a volume of about 76GB when it's run, in BIOS it shows as an 80GB HDD).

Okay, you would think that if I've just installed XP without a problem there is not a problem with my system. But suddenly, I cannot boot. I'm getting the message "Non-system disk or disk error". That's daft - I've just installed then booted into XP a few moments ago.

BIOS takes longer than it did, used to take a few seconds, now, about 30.

But, how can everything boot up one minute, the next no boot? Crazy.

 

[richard8654]

Latest: OS will boot up from IDE master channel - but only if there is a slave HDD connected,which does not need to be bootable.

What would cause that situation?

 

[richard8654]

Follow-up: SOLVED: Problem was with my original HDD, probably partition trouble. It would boot up on master, but only if a secondary HDD was connected. I made a clone, then I cloned the clone. With these two HDDs, I can have no HDD connected on slave or disable slave in BIOS, and now, HDD on master does boot. So, I did NOT frazzle my IDE master channel.