I had a problem with my IDE cables today. What would happen is the BIOS would not pick up the proper size of the hard drive and would then not boot because of the inability to detect a boot sector.
The first thing I did was change my 80-wire IDE cable but it still didn’t work. This ‘threw me off because the odds are against one having two bad IDE cables so I went off in another direction.
Occasionally I had been loosing the CMOS setting, which in most cases indicates a bad board battery. Purchased a new board battery from Staples for a reasonable two dollars and seventy-five cents.
Replacing the battery didn’t solve the problem so I tried to use Symantec’s antivirus CD (booted from the DVD drive) and attempted to scan the hard drive. This didn’t work. I guess because the hard drive wasn’t being properly detected so this was not a smart move anyway.
I then disconnected the DVD drive and the floppy drive. They are only two drives I presently have hooked up to my computer besides the hard drive at this time. Still nothing.
I then went into the BIOS and started to play with the settings. I tried so many configurations that I don’t want to write about them.
The next step I tried was to take the IDE cable connected to the DVD drive on the secondary IDE connector on the motherboard and put it on the primary motherboard IDE connector and attach it to the hard drive. Viola! This worked. I booted into my offline hard drive with no problem.
That brought me back to my earlier suspicion that the problem was with the IDE cables. I then pulled out a third 80-wire IDE cable I have and attached everything. It worked. The problem was solved and I am back in business.
The problem was a bad IDE cable. The one I tried to replace it with was also bad. I looked carefully over both cables and could not detect any problems which tells me that everything can appear outwardly okay on the flat gray ribbon cable and yet it still be defective.