I tried to boot up my computer the other day and my bios failed to detect my primary master (hard drive with my OS on it) correctly. The hard drive is a Maxtor 13.6, but it detected it as a Maxtor ORION with about 6.3 gigs. I went into the bios and tried changing a few things around on how it gets detected, restarted and nothing changed. So i turned my computer off, unplugged it, took the HD out of its carrier (still connected) and jotted down all the cylinder/head/sector information. I then plugged my computer back in and turned it on and everything worked fine. My question is why did my bios fail to detect my hard drive correctly when everything is set on "Auto detect" and also what did I do to make it work again? The only thing I can think of is unplugging and re-plugging the power cord. Any ideas?

Unplug PC, remove mobo battery for a minute and replace it, now power up and see if it corrects.

Everything is ok now, but I just dont understand why it would happen out of the blue like that. I guess all i did was unplug the PC, wait a minute (while I jotted down hd info), then plugged PC back in and powered it up.

BTW pcservicetech... I DO like the dark blue skin :P

Dont try to understand it. Computers are demon spawn LOL.... sometimes things just happen and we will never quite know why.

Hmm... that was a Maxtor harddrive? Right. Something similar happened to me not too long ago. I had this config at the time:

Harddrive 1 - Quantum (2 GB)
C: win98se

Harddrive 2 - Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X (60GB)
D: w2k
E: w2k server
F: xp pro
G: storage

I started my comp and the maxtor disk was not there. I went into bios and checked it, and it really wasn´t there. Did auto detect. Nothing. Went and got a new battery for the bios even though the mobo was only 2 months old. Did auto detect again. Nothing. Entered the info manually and it found it but on next reboot it was gone again. Then I switched the jumpers on the disks reversing master and slave and on reboot both disks were there. This of course made the system unbootable but when I switched the jumpers back again everything was fine. Never had a problem since then.

I´m thinking maybe this has something to do with Maxtor disks?

Also try a BIOS update if things still go weird.