Last night my power supply over heated and got fried, so today I bought a new one. I get it hooked up and I've tryed every jumper/IDE configuration possible but my PC will not recognize either of my HDDs. The only thing that is different from last night is the new power supply. I can get the PC to recognize my DVD drive but even when I use the same power connection and IDE cable as the DVD drive it still wont recognize the master HDD. After failing all those times I took the master HDD out and made it a slave in another PC and it worked fine. I don't know what else to try.
I've tried only having the master HDD connected as a slave. master, and w/o a jumper, and I've tried it while having 2 HDDs and a DVD drive connected with the same jumper configurations for the master and left the slave HDD jumper alone in the slave position. I've disconnected the IDE cables completely and reconnected them. The power supply has the same max output as the old 1 and I could feel the HDDs spinning every time I turned the PC on.

I'm thinking.......
You've exhausted every avenue I'd have gone down immediately.

You've tried the jumpers on the Master HD in both Master and Cable Select positions ?

when the power supply fried it could have caused some damage to the motherboard. Mind you first thing id try is setting bios to factory default / failesafe settings and see

Hello CareBralcow, welcome to PCHF.

The fact that your last one overheated is extreemly worrying. Do you know why it overheated? Was it a poor quality power supply? Did the fan fail? Was the overall system temperature too high? If the last one blew, then there's no telling what damage this could have caused further down the line - motherboard, hdd controller, hdd board itself.

The first thing you need to do is to find out exactly what is working properly and what is not. Disconnect everything except for your main HDD. Connect your main HDD as Primary Master, Primary Slave and then Secondary Master and finally Secondary Slave. Do the same with your other HDD and then your DVD ROM. ---You will then see a pattern.

Reminder: The jumper settings is different between devices, so make sure that you check the label between each one.

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he said he tested the hdd in another machine wish id thought it might have damged the motherboard

As slave, yes your right. But what about the other HDD and DVD? I'm suspecting controller failure, do you agree? Mind you, it wouldn't harm to try another IDE cable, just in case.

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zinglebarb agrees: :)

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yeah I agree it could have blown the controller. Might have messed up the bios also thats why I think a cmos clear will be a good first step. It does depend on how the Power Supply Unit blew if it proper blew anything could have been blitzed

I'm not sure why it blew but I am certain it has to do with the fact that I took it on 2 8 hour drives (squished by a couple pillows in my back seat) from GA to KY a week before that. I drove up there on the 4th and had to completely reconnect my IDE cables when I got there because my HDD wasnt being recognized (at this time I didnt have the DVD drive connected to power) and that fixed it. then I came back a week later and about 5 days ago, when I got really close to the back of the PC I could smell that something was really hot but I do remember that the fan was still working. Dumb me didn't think anything of it and a few days later it gets fried. Im going to go try these suggestions now and I'll post once I'm done. I've had this power supply for at least a year and it can perform well over what is required of it. I usually only turn the PC off for maybe an hour every week but I have a good circulation of air. I have a big CPU fan, my Nvidia card has a fan, and I have a fan on the side of the case blowing cool air in from the an open area in my room.

I dont really know the difference in primary and secondary. Is the difference whether I use the middle connection on the IDE cable rather than the connection on the end? I havnt tried that yet but I have tried using the end of both of the IDE cables that I have, I'll also try using a brand new IDE cable this time.

The reset default BIOS settings fixed it, but I had a really slow boot. It took it a whole minute to recognize the HDD (I only have the 1 IDE device connected right now) and then I was staring at a blank screen with the blinking DOS cursor for another whole minute before Windows XP started loading. Now that I have windows loaded I have another problem which actually happened about an hour or 2 before my power supply fried. My audio drivers have gone bad. Last time it happened when I gently (or casually) unplugged my mic from the sound card. The way I fixed it then was I disconnected and reconnected my sound card and that fixed it.

Could these problems possibly be the result of having an old desk that is a little wobbly. Its not terribly wobbly but if I wanted to I could shake the top of the desk about half an inch either way from where it sits on its own. Its not a rare occurrence that I bump the desk a little either. The PC sits on top of the desk at the same level as the monitors at almost waist height.

Ok, I just turned my PC off to fix my sound problem and I connected my DVD drive and slave HDD this time (they weren't connected at all when I made my last post) and yet again it doesn't recognize the master HDD, so I turn it off, connect the master drive to the end of the IDE cable and it starts up as fast as it normally does, about 1 minute total. I don't understand this at all because one time earlier today, before I ever posted here, I booted from my Windows XP CD and it couldn't recognize any HDDs, at that time I had the master drive connected to the middle of the IDE cable (the same cable its connected to now, and the same IDE slot on the Motherboard) and I had the slave HDD connected to the end of that IDE cable. Maybe Im forgetting a detail of when I just did (I do have a bad short term memory) but Im pretty confident that all of this is accurate information.

Thanks for all the help everyone.