I am running an AMD Duron 1300 mhz with Windows XP. This morning I got up and turned my computer on and it cannot find the hard drive now, the bios doesn't even register it.
Here's how it started:
I upgraded my memory from 1 256 meg PCI 133 to a 512 meg DDR. Upon booting up, everything worked fine through bios and then the sceen was simply blank (black), when it tried to load Windows XP. I reset the machine, and it said it registered a failed attempt to boot, and asked whether or not safe mode or normal. So I did safe mode, everything seemed to be working fine, so I restarted and it booted up just fine.
I then changed out my AGP video card, and it did the same thing, except this time I just told it to boot normally, no safe mode, and it started just fine. I loaded the drivers and everything without any problems.
So, now every time I boot up over the past 2 days it goes through bios and then gives me a black screen. I reset the computer and it registers a failed attempt to boot previously, and I tell it to start normally, and I leave it on all day without any problems.
This morning I booted up and jumped in the shower, forgetting about the need to reset, and it sat there on the blank screen for about 10 minutes, then I reset, but this time it couldn't find the hard drive and started scanning the CD roms and floppy drive for a master boot record. I had just run a scan with Norton the night before, and it auto-updates from the web, so it should be pretty accurate. The bios could not find the hard drive, so I popped a Windows 98 start up disk from my other computer in and sure enough, no hard drive.
Any ideas? I have no idea if changing out the memory and the start up problems are related, but I checked the cables and everything is still hooked up. I guess I can try disconnecting and re-connecting the cables, but I don't know what to try. I could put the hard drive in my other machine which is running 98, and see if the hard drive works. I also know Maxtor and Western Digital have tools that can be used to set up hard drives and such, anyone know any good diagonstic tools.