SATA Drive and ATA Hard Drive Diagnostic Flowchart

Hard drive failure is less common then people think, but always unexpected when it happens. Hard drives have three basic failure mechanisms: mechanical, electronic (onboard and PC interface) and malware, which I include since the result to your data is the same. This troubleshooting procedure applies to both SATA and IDE hard drives. We begin by asking if all of the hard drives you have installed showing up in CMOS Setup? Most BIOS routines will also report on the drives installed in a boot splash screen, but it may go by too quickly for you to read. Every motherboard BIOS needs to be able to identify hard drives by brand, model, capacity and capabilities. Brand name PCs use a custom BIOS routine that often skips the splash screen at start-up or replaces it with a manufacturer splash screen, so a visit to CMOS Setup will be necessary. The eBook of which this hard drive troubleshooting flowchart is one of seventeen is available for instant download.

Hard Drive Troubleshooting

Instructions for entering CMOS Setup are usually flashed at the bottom of the screen at power on, but if you don't see the key combination to hit, you'll have to do an Internet search or find the original system documentation. The old standards for accessing CMOS Setup after immediately after power on include the <DEL> key, and the <F1> or <F2> keys, but I've seen plenty others used. Do you hear the hard drive spinning up? If you don't hear anything at all when you turn on the power, you should start with thetroubleshooting flowchart for ATX power failure. If you don't hear the drive spinning up, you'll have to open the case and make sure the power connections seated, more of a challenge with the connectors on the old ATA drives than on new SATA drives with SATA power connectors. If your hearing isn't very good and you're comfortable working around live electronics, you can try removing the hard drive cage and holding it in your hand while powering up. If the drive spins, you'll feel it like a gyroscope. But don't try this if you're likely to take a fright and drop the cage on the motherboard, and watch out for loose screws. For testing a hard drive out of the case, an unpowered USB

enclosure is good for the 2.5" hard drives used in laptops, but you'll need a powered USB shell to test a 3.5" desktop drive. Return to Diagnostic Chart The diagnostic flowchart offers two paths here, one for the older ATA drives, also known as IDE or lately as PATA (for Parallel ATA) and another path for the new SATA (Serial ATA) drives. The SATA drives feature a much simpler data cable that rarely causes problems, and an easier to install power connection, though some SATA hard drives support both the old and new power connectors. IDE or ATA drives feature feature ribbon cables that can support two drives, so they also include a block of jumpers on the drive for setting a Master and Slave, or telling the cable to make the selection (CS). Return to Diagnostic Chart The first SATA drives were capable of 1.5 Gb/s which is also known as SATA 1. This wasn't as big a jump over the old ATA drives as you might think, because IDE speeds were measured in MB/s, bytes not bits. The SATA 2 generation supports 3.0 Gb/s, and the latest release, SATA 3, supports 6.0 Gb/s. Note that the high speeds are generally achieved by transferring data out of cache memory on the drive, the rotation speeds haven't kept up with the electronics. If you install an SATA 2 or an SATA 3 drive in an old system and it doesn't work properly, check the drive for a compatibility jumper to force it to work at the lower SATA 1 speed. Return to Diagnostic Chart SATA hard drives are much nicer to work with than old ATA drives as the dedicated data cable eliminates all addressing confusion and the cables are much more robust than the old ribbon cables that sometimes pulled apart with use. If your SATA drive is spinning up yet it's not detected by CMOS Setup, it's always possible that you have that rare bad data cable or didn't make the connection on the motherboard properly. It's pretty hard to get it wrong on the drive end. If you know the SATA cable is good because you tried it elsewhere, try connecting to a different SATA port on the motherboard. If it's the only SATA drive in the system and your motherboard supports both an SATA RAID and

stand-alone SATA ports, use a stand-alone port. If you're running an SATA drive off an add-in adapter, the add-in adapter will have to load its own BIOS and the drive won't show up in the motherboard CMOS Setup. Return to Diagnostic Chart Are you running two ATA drives on a wide ribbon cable with three connectors, one for the motherboard IDE port and one for each drive? If the cable is straight through, you'll need to set the jumpers on the boot drive to "Master" and on the second drive to "Slave". If it's an 80 wire cable with three different color connectors or an old 40 wire cable with an obvious pair of wires twisted between the two drive connectors, than it will support "cable select" and you can set the jumper on both drives to CS, often the default position. Some older IDE drives included a jumper position for "single" when it was the only drive installed. Motherboards in the pre-SATA days all included two ATA drive connectors, a primary and a secondary, and it was normal to hang the boot hard drive on the primary and the CD or DVD drive on the secondary. Return to Diagnostic Chart Most computers built with the older ATA drives used Cable Select (CS), where pin 28 in the cable selected the drive as Master or Slave. The newer 80 wire Ultra DMA ribbon cables that started shipping with new motherboards around fifteen years ago use color coded connectors. Blue goes to the Motherboard, Grey goes to the ATA Slave (on the middle of the cable) and Black goes to the Master ATA drive on the end of the cable. This will always be the boot hard drive on the primary controller. Return to Diagnostic Chart If sorting out the Master/Slave addressing doesn't make the drives show up in CMOS Setup, check the Molex 4x1 power lead to the hard drive. It can take a lot of force to seat these old power connectors decently, but don't start using foreign objects to push them in, if your fingers start to hurt you're trying too hard. Sometimes the ribbon cable will be stretched tight to reach from the motherboard to the first drive connection, and in these instances, it's common for the connector to sneak back out of the port a little, or for the connector to start to break open on the cable. Data cable failures aren't that common unless you're always swapping drives and pulling the connectors out of the drive ports by

the cable. For whatever reason, consumer affairs reporters who want a subject for an article will often use a doctored data cable to try to trick a retail store into making a mistake and selling them a new hard drive or motherboard. It can work, because most techs don't expect the cable failing out of the blue. Return to Diagnostic Chart Are the connectors on the IDE ribbon cable keyed so that they can only be inserted in the motherboard and drive ports in the proper orientation? All cables should be keyed, but they also identify the pin 1 location through a colored wire in the ribbon cable or through numbers on the connectors. The pin 1 location on ports is identified with a number or an arrow, and on ATA drives, it's almost always the end nearer to the power connector. If nothing you do will get CMOS Setup to register the presence of a drive, even with a new cable, than either the motherboard controller is bad or the drive is bad. The next step is to test the drive in another system or in an external USB shell. If the drive is good, the motherboard controller is bad and the only option is to try the secondary controller (if you haven't done so) or to buy a add-in adapter to interface the ATA drive with the PCI bus. These ATA add-in cards are very cheap since all the brains are on the drive. Return to Diagnostic Chart The troubleshooting process is the same for all ATA drives not recognized in CMOS Setup, whether PATA, SATA, hard drives, CD drives, DVD drives or other media. If the motherboard If the motherboard BIOS recognizes the drives and reports them in the splash screen or CMOS Setup, and the problem is with a CD or DVD drive, move on to the flowchart for troubleshooting CD and DVD failure. Return to Diagnostic Chart Does the hard drive spin up and then stop? Start by swapping the power lead for a spare or take one from another drive. If it's not an SATA drive, make sure the hard drive is on the primary IDE controller and the only drive on the ribbon cable, even if it means disconnecting your DVD drive for the sake of troubleshooting. If it still spins up and down, disconnect the data cable and see if it stops. If drive cycles up and down with nothing but power attached, it's probably toast, though it can't hurt to test it in a USB shell before tossing it.

One failure mechanism with old drives is the voice coil that drives the read/write head arm out over the platter. This seeking sound is the irregular noise that comes out of hard drives, not the faint hum from the spin. If you have an old drive that won't seek, it's probably a mechanical failure of the voice coil that drives the read/write head arm. If you don't want to spend a ton of money sending it out for data recovery but you have some data you never backed up that you'd like to recover, try tapping the drive cover softly with a screwdriver, in the area between the end with the cables and the start of the round section where the platters are spinning. It may just free up a stuck arm. Some techs swear by putting the driver in a freezer bag and sticking it in the freezer for a few hours, since the thermal contraction will move things around inside and maybe help a little with overheated power electronics that moves the read/write head. Before you try either of these tactics, make sure you have your back-up plan, usually a USB memory stick, ready and working, because you might get the drive to work just one more time, and it may not last long. Return to Diagnostic Chart Does the BIOS register the wrong transfer mode you expected for IDE drives, (UDMA/100, ATA/66) etc? Make sure you have the best mode enabled in CMOS Setup, because some BIOS manufacturers keep supporting obsolete modes from 20 years ago, long after everybody stopped using them. For the last fifteen or sixteen year, ATA hard drives have shipped with 80 wire ribbon cables for high speed UDMA, where half of the wires serve as signal grounds. And if you've added a new hard drive to an older system, it could be that the drive just isn't capable of slowing down its data transfer enough to cope with the old controller. At some point, backward compatibility just becomes a nuisance. But I would never recommend flashing the BIOS on an old motherboard just to try to get a hard drive to work in the proper mode. Reflashing the BIOS just has a way of going wrong sometimes, like when a sudden power outage leaves you with nothing and no way to start over. Return to Diagnostic Chart Can you boot any operating system with any version of FDISK from CD or DVD and view partitions on the drive? You'll likely need to change the CMOS boot sequence to put the CD or DVD first or the system can just hang trying to boot the faulty hard drive. If the drive space shows up as unallocated, you can try creating a new partition and starting over if you don't mind saying goodbye to any data that might have been recoverable with more sophisticated software. If you can't see any partition information or the drive doesn't show up in FDISK and your're ready to give up on the

data, you can try running FDISK/MBR from the command line. FDISK.MBR will attempt to rewrite the Master Boot Record, which could have been corrupted or attacked by a virus. Return to Diagnostic Chart