Broken Hard Drive?

I restarted my computer and it ended up freezing at the BIOS screen because of my second hard drive, so I went into the BIOS menu and removed it, but when I auto detected'd it to put it in again, everything was fine but after saving and rebooting, there was no sign of the second hard drive in the hardware check during start up. Wtf?

buy a new computer

First thing to do is check your cables.

I did check my cable.

Second thing to do, most brands have a testing utility to see what's up with hard drive and check if it's faulty, try one of those suitable for your brand of hard drive. (example,maxtor has PowerMax, seagate has seatools, wdc has something called datalifeguard, etc) Usually you can find things like this on webpages of your drive manufacturer, in the support section/file downloads. If this type of utility fails to run on your drive, you can try putting your drive in another computer to test, incase it wasn't the drives fault.

Have you tried clearing the CMOS on your motherboard? Sometimes IDE autodetection can get screwed up and stop working, or only work sporadically. Clearing the CMOS can sometimes fix it, or if that fails, reflashing the motherboard BIOS. I've also seen this happen when the motherboard has been damaged (in at least one case after a known power surge).

>>6
Cool, that seems like the best solution, but how do I clear my CMOS or reflasg my BIOS? Do I just remove the battery for 20 minutes so it resets?

>>7
That's one way, but a quicker method is to find the reset jumper. Check your manual, or look on the board's silkscreened labels for something like CMOS RST - it's usually a pair or trio of pins fairly near the battery or the BIOS chip. You have to unshort or short the pins, or swap the jumper onto a different pair, depending on the motherboard.

As for reflashing, you need to visit your motherboard's manufacturer's website and download the current BIOS for your model of board, along with the utility they supply for reflashing the BIOS. Make absolutely sure you get the right BIOS image for your make and model though! Reflashing is sometimes done without a downloaded utility, using a keypress during the power-on self test. Again, download/read the manual for your make and model of motherboard.

>>8
Thanks, I will try that once I can get spare time.