Hi I bought a gaming computer awhile back like about 6months ago or so i'd say. When i first got it the hardrive which already had windows XP pro installed had trouble detecting the hardrive. Only after 30minutes or so of reconnecting the SATA cable that it was finally able to read the hardrive. Which brings me to my problem.....yesterday I felt like cleaning my computer so I opened it up and started blowing the dust etc etc. I am guessing that i must've pushed the SATA cord or something a bit and when I tried to boot up the computer which was working fine 2minutes before popped up the NTLDR is missing message. So I spent over an hour unplugging and replugging and trying different sides of the cables but nothing seemed to work. I then realized that one side of the cable had a crack so then I went to go buy a new cable today. I tried out the new cable and nothing seemed to work....I still get the NTLDR message that it cannot detect my Main hardrive but it can detect my other hardrives. Is there anyway I could fix this??? Please help me with this problem!!! much appreciated
If the BIOS cannot see the HDD, it will not be able to boot from it. Unfortunately, if the BIOS does not see the drive, there is no diagnostic tool that I know of that can detect or repair and problems with the physical drive itself.
As a test to see if the drive works at all and that it's not your motherboard, you can get an HDD to USB converter and plug it in as an external hard drive, but you would need a 2nd computer for that.
I have a lower end HDD to USB that I bought for like $20 at a local computer parts store (http://www.microcenter.com)
I don't see the one I bought, so they might not list the lower end products on their website. The one I bought does not have an enclosure, its just a cable with a converter on the end of it.
turns out all i had to do was unplug my external hardrives and reboot with the main drive by itself and it worked....thanks for the info tho airbourne!
turns out all i had to do was unplug my external hardrives and reboot with the main drive by itself and it worked....thanks for the info tho airbourne!
He he he he, the old booting from the removable media trick a? (been there before!)
go into set up and configure the boot sequence, so you dont have to keep bending over and pulling out usb devices every couple of days or so (its real hard on the back you know!) He he he he
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