Are all installed ATA drives properly identified by the BIOS and displayed on the start-up screen? Any modern PC should be able to identify the drive by model number, brand, capacity, and usually the transfer mode.
Some brand name PCs may not display a start-up BIOS registration screen, so you'll have to enter CMOS Setup to view the information. If the key stroke required to enter CMOS Setup isn't displayed on the screen as the PC begins to boot, you'll need to look it up in the documentation or on the Internet.
Common keys used to access CMOS Setup at boot are, <DEL>, <F1> and <F2>. Does the hard drive spin up? We covered this in the power supply diagnostics, but I'll repeat it here for convenience.
When the PC powers up, you should hear the hard drive motor spinning up the drive and the gentle clunking sound of the read/wrote head seeking. If I can't tell whether or not the drive is spinning up, even with my fingers on the drive's top cover, I run the drive in my hand. A spun up drive resists a slow twisting movement just like a gyroscope.
Don't flip it quickly or play with it or you may damage the drive, not to mention
touching the circuitry against a conductor and causing a short. Just power down, put the drive back in and continue with the diagnostics. If it's a SCSI drive, you're on the wrong diagnostics page, but maybe some new ATA hard drive will adopt the SCSI practice of a jumper to delay spin up.
SCSI drives offer this option since you can install up to 15 on a single controller, and spinning them all up at once would cause the hardiest power supply to droop. Try swapping the power lead or running the drive on another power supply.
One of the reasons I always use four screws in older PATA drives is so I can push hard on the power connector without the unit shifting around and possibly damaging the circuit board. I've never broken a power socket off the circuit board on a hard drive, but I've seen it done, so don't go too crazy on it.
Try the hard drive in another PC or a USB shell before you conclude that it's dead.
The diagnostic tree splits here between the newer SATA (Serial ATA) drives and the older PATA (Parallel ATA) drives. PATA drives are often referred to as plain “ATA” or “IDE”, the terms refer to the same technology.
SATA and PATA drives feature different connectors for both for power and data, so you can’t hook the wrong drive up to the wrong interface. On the SATA drives, the power cable is wider than the data cable, on the older PATA or IDE drives, the data cable is a wide ribbon cable and the power cable is an old fashioned Molex with red, yellow and black wires.
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