if when the computer boots up, it said cannot find hard disk, and it was working just fine before it was shut down,
anyone know what could be the problem?
its a dell optiplex , scsi-2.
Your hard drive crashed?
No. Really. It’s happened to me twice (w/Macs, though).
I assume you mean your boot/startup drive. If it’s one of your other drives, just let the computer start up and then run a disk utility program. I often have to use FWB Mounter (Mac, again) to locate my Zip drive and external hard drive.
That’s a remedy, though. As for the cause (your OP), I don’t really know. Because computers still aren’t perfect?
I’m not an SCSI maven (I’m sure one will be along shortly) but typically when a drive cannot be found it means
1: Cable failure - very rare
2: Drive electronics have died completely - rare to unusual
3: Cable has become loose - unusual if system has not been moved or fiddled with but possible
4: System MB BIOS drive settings have suffered amnesia - possible bad MB BIOS backup battery. Re-enter drive parameters into BIOS. If it works after that but “forgets” drive presence again after system is powered down (not simple reset) bad battery is almost surely cause.
5: If this is SCSI your controller card might have gone south. Get another card to test or try re-seating card in adjacent slot to make sure it is making good contact.
SCSI experts may have other suggestions.
If you are connected to SCSI through a host adaptor your system might not be seeing your hard drive.
This used to happen to me until I changed the BIOS settings.
I can’t remember which one I changed it to and I took so long to get things going that I’m not going in there to find out.
I think I’m set to SCSI/C/CDROM.
Is your adaptor is not loading its BIOS during boot-up ?
Check its all well plugged in, it looked fine on mine at first but that was another reason mine didn’t play too.
I’m not a SCSI maven, but I’ve debugged enough SCSI problems to pretty much know what I’m doing…
Astro: every SCSI controller I’ve ever worked with does auto detect on bootup (let’s discount expensive RAID controllers, since we can be reasonably sure that chief does not have such a device), so you don’t need to tell the BIOS about the disks.
Chief: most SCSI controllers will print out a multi-line banner with their BIOS information during the normal boot process. You will see this after the standard system BIOS. After that they’ll typically list the SCSI devices that they detect, going from lowest SCSI ID to highest.
If you’re not seeing the SCSI BIOS at all, it means that your system is not seeing your SCSI controller. If you see the SCSI BIOS, but you don’t see a list of devices after it, it means that your SCSI card isn’t seeing the devices.
Do you know if your SCSI adapter is onboard or a separate card? If it’s a separate card, try opening the case and reseating it. It’s possible that expansion and contraction from heat have caused the card to move slightly; if some dust got in there it could cause the card not to work. If you have an onboard SCSI controller, there may not be much you can do. Try booting up again, go into the BIOS, and check to see if there are any settings for SCSI controller. Make sure it’s not disabled. Also, check the system date. If it’s way off (like 1/1/98), chances are your battery has died. Another thing to check in the BIOS is the IDE hard drive setup. Make sure that the system isn’t expecting a hard drive to be there; IDE almost always has precedence over SCSI, and if the system expects to see an IDE hard drive, it will try to boot from it, and will never even get to the SCSI devices.
If it turns out that you have an onboard SCSI controller, and it’s dead, you don’t necessarily need to replace the motherboard - you could purchase a separate PCI SCSI controller to use in its place. However, I’d guess that failure of an onboard SCSI controller is rare.
Do you have any external SCSI devices? If so, try disconnecting them and rebooting.
before i tried moving the scsi card into another slot and that didn’t do anything.
i dont know why the card wouldn’t be seeing the hard drive…its a server that has been in use constantly…
it would suck if its a hard drive failure
When you start up your pc do you get a message come up from the adapter card such as
SCSI BIOS loading and then
SCSI BIOS loaded succesfully.
If you do then you should be able to hit a key combination which will allow you to get into the onboard SCSI utilities which allows you to format your drive etc or assigned interrupts.You should then be able to attempt a surfave scan of the hard drive.
If you dont then it may not be the hard drive at all, it will either be a problem with your motherboard Bios or the card itself.