Hard drive suddenly disappearing from BIOS.
 

Help! Randomly when i boot, my bios wont detect my drive and just show me a black screen. i need to reload my "failsafe defaults" everytime.

Usually this is indicative of a dying hard disk. Transfer all your stuff as soon as you can, before we try any troubleshooting.

thanks for the advice :)

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but if the computer won't boot the hard disk due to bios issue, wouldn't that be a failing motherboard? At least, that's what I had to replace for a friend when he was having a somewhat similar issue...

I tend to lean on the faulty hard disk because he says this is 'random'. It may indeed be a faulty motherboard, but to be on the safe side, SoMeBoDy should transfer all this data out first, before we do some troubleshooting

everything important is now copied to another physical drive. troubleshoot away :)

As far as the hard disk is concerned, are you hearing any audible "clicks"?

Here's what we can do for basic troubleshooting:

1. Change your BIOS battery
2. Run a chkdsk on your hard disk (with /r /f switches) and see if there are any reported errors
3. On Event Viewer (Run > eventvwr.smc), see if there are any red or yellow logs under Application and System. If so, paste the messages here or attach the EVT files (right-click, save log file as).

Frankly speaking, the easiest way to tell what is causing a problem is to swap the suspect component for another which you know to be completely functional. In this case, you are testing your hard disk and motherboard. The long method to go about this would be:

• Try hard disk on a computer with a fully-functional motherboard
• Try fully-functional hard disk on your computer
• Try your motherboard on a computer with a fully-functional hard disk, and;
• Try a fully-functional motherboard on your computer

I suspect you don't want to do it (who wants to take apart two computers and swap motherboards?) So, I recommend you pick up the Ultimate Boot CD via your favorite Bittorrent site, and run some of the stress tests for CPU and memory.

(Sorry, motherboards aren't my specialty. You'll have to ask RYU, LiquidAcid or some other person for that.)

If you want him to test it out with a CPU/Memory Stresstest, why not have him download Orthos and give it a go. I'm pretty sure that has a stress test on it for that...

I could be wrong though.

I doubt we'll be hearing from him soon. He seems to be banned for some reason.