Posted by Kermit the Frog (12.165.205.69) on August 02, 2003 at 03:52:11:
I know I'm now replying to a post which is well over a year old, but I wanted to add my input in case anyone happens across this thread.
I have a suspicion about what actually happened to Tracey's hard drive, because I've had a similar problem with the hard drive in my Compaq (a Presario 5000 series model). The computer suddenly wouldn't recognize the hard drive and brought up an "Operating system not found on any devices" message. Eventually I opened up my Compaq to check out the hard drive and see if maybe one of the cables had gotten jarred loose. Looking at the drive's circuit board made the problem clear, however. One of the chips on the board had literally burned out!
The drive in my Presario was a Quantum Fireball model-- it is not actually made by Compaq, but rather by Quantum (now Maxtor). Quantum Fireballs are in a heck of a lot of Presarios, though, and this flameout problem has happened with many Quantum Fireball hard drives.
One chip on the Fireball hard drive's circuit board-- the Philips TDA5247HT chip-- is prone to overheating and eventually melting or catching on fire. I saw one post on another message board which read, "Quantum did not heat sink the chip properly and they fail regularly."
If this happens to your hard drive, the damage will be very apparent when you look at the various chips on the circuit board.
While this may not be the same problem Tracey experienced, I thought I would pass it along anyway.