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BIOS don't recognize 500GB HHDD!!!!!

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 6:43 am
by Juan C.
I bought a 500 GB Western Digital HHDD and installed as a master, but my BIOS doesn't recognize it? What I should do to fix the problem?

Posted: Mon Aug 10, 2009 5:55 pm
by edwin
How old is your system/motherboard? Anything over 5 years old will have a problem with that.

Re: BIOS don't recognize 500GB HHDD!!!!!

Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2019 4:08 am
by RichardNenoff
Since BIOS does not see the hard drive, best guess is the drive is bad. Get a similar new drive and install it. If BIOS sees the drive, then your old drive was bad. Now you just have to install Windows and get back to work. If you are very unlucky, your motherboard is bad. If the CD drive does not work either, most likely the SATA controller is not working and the motherboard might be bad. That's unlikely, but you said you can't boot from DVD, so I mention it. The more likely failure is hard drive.

Hard drives do fail. It could have been caused by wearout, impact, or overheating. If the laptop is old, and you used it a lot, it might be worn out. If you dropped the laptop hard , that usually breaks or cracks something like a display, or display bezel, so you'll see evidence. If your laptop cracked, the hard drive could be damaged too. The last problem, overheating, is common and can be due to hard drive bearing wearout, or clogged cooling fan. You can't economically repair a disk drive, so replace it if that is the cause.

After a couple of years, dust, lint and hair find their way into the cooling fan area and block the flow. This is really more of a problem for the graphics unit and the CPU. The machine has a heat sensor and will reduce clock speed to reduce heating. That's the clue, the machine slowing down for no apparent reason after you turn it on for a few minutes.

The cooling fan takes a little effort to clean, but you can do it. The best instructions for that are posted on Youtube. Find a video about cleaning a laptop fan on a laptop similar to yours. There are many models posted, but each brand (Dell, HP, Sony, Lenovo, etc.) usually has common enough physical layout that you can work out how to do your model. And good luck!