IDE Channels

Hello everyone. Alright, so last night there was a major thunderstorm near my house, and I wasn't home, so I could turn off my computer. When I came home from work, my had not booted to windows, but instead it give me a warning about inserting a proper boot device. Basically it didn't not see my hdd. Now my harddrive is a Maxtor ATAII. When I changed the IDE channel to another connections, it worked. So I was jsut wondering did the power outage/surge destroy a part of my motherboard, or is there just something weird happening with my hdd. There are no other hdd's in my house with this same connection as mine(it's a red cable, if that helps at all). This has happened to me before, where I lose an IDE channel. I am now down to my last IDE channel, so I'm praying its not my motherboard going on me, but its just something with my hdd and carp**. Thanks in advanced - Brad

Hi FarFig, Have you looked in Device Manager for any yellow or red warnings under Hard Disk Controllers. If warnings are present you have the option to Refresh, or Remove then reboot to allow windows to "find" the controller automatically at boot "finding new hardware" and "finding software/drivers for new hardware". If you do this, you may find your IDE Channels can be functional again. As a "last resort" you can purchase a PCI slot based card with additional IDE Channels. Best Regards

I just checked under the device manager, and there were no yellow or red flags under my IDE. the only ones that do have yellow warnings, are: Ethernet Controller and SM Bus Controller Other than that, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong in the DM. I have a couple spare PCI slots, but we'll see if it comes to that

Fix that SM Bus Controller……….. System Management Bus Controller. You may find the driver for it on the Drivers CD that may have come with your machine. You may find the driver from the MotherBoard Manufacturer's website ****But Most Importantly, the warning at SM Bus Controller quite often/most often, indicates that you have not installed the MotherBoard ChipSet Drivers. All kinds of stuff will begin working better after you install the ChipSet Driversm And….. All kinds of failures and stuff not working is bound to occur if the Chipset Drivers are not installed. After installing Chipset Drivers, you may find stuff appearing in your Device Manager that weren't there before….. and that would be a good thing. Best Regards

Alright, so after many many many problems, I finally managed to fix it all. For whatever reason, when I tried to re-install the chipset drivers, my system froze. After 30 min's of not unfreezing, i restarted. When i did, i lost all usb devices, and even my PS2 keyboard/mouse i had lying around would not work once windows started. I changed a setting in my bios and that was fixed. I downloaded some drivers from the intel site, and now everything seems back up and running. Thanks dough. I appericate it alot.