On Thu, 13 May 2010 11:40:28 -0700, David Farber wrote:

I use my generic, home made, pc to test and analyze client's hard
drives. The motherboard in my pc is an ECS NFORCE3. It's never given me
any problems. When I hooked up the test drive in question (lots of
knocking noises) on the second IDE channel, the pc booted, the pc
speaker beeped once (normal for this pc), but it just froze after that.
I rebooted and tried to go into the setup menu but that didn't work
either. I gave up on the test and removed the drive I was checking. But
now, the same problem occurs. The pc powers up, speaker beeps, and it
freezes there. If I press "delete" to enter setup, it just hangs without
going into setup. If I remember correctly, immediately after removing
the test drive, I was able to get to the bios menu but it said no drive
was installed. I used the internal clear CMOS jumper to reset the bios
but the outcome was the same. Now, I am not even able to get that far.
If I put in any other drive, I am able to access the bios menu and the
drive is recognized correctly. I was not having any problems with the
drive before adding the test drive on the secondary IDE channel. I can
feel the motor humming when the machine is powered up. I've tried
switching between "cable select" and "master=on, slave =off," that
didn't help. There are no clicking or foreign noises. I was hoping to
purchase a used drive of the same model and swap out the controller
boards. My question is, how close of a match do these boards have to be?
So far I have found the same drive model number and firmware code, but a
different HDA p/n. Anyone have any luck doing a swap like this? Is there
some identifying data on the hard drive platters themselves that would
cause the drive to "disappear" like this? I did try the drive in another
pc. It gave a similar error, "Drive not detected," and asked if I wanted
to bypass the detection process.

Thanks for your reply.

WHEW what a read. Put a known good drive on the dead drive cable. If CMOS
enumerates it then the drive electronics are hosed and you can either
toss it, try to find an exact working drive and swap the control board or
send it off to a recovery service if it has data on it you can't do
without.