MHDD, Seatools, etc. What am I doing wrong

[WDHIII]

I cannot get any HDD diagnostic tools to recognize drives attached to my bench machine. I have booted into MHDD from a cd, from ubcd, and a usb device and it will not recognize any drive, even the one that runs my windows installation.

I am sure that there is something wrong with my setup. I am using a Dell E510 with the case open as my bench system. I am really having a hard time with this.

I even tried to run MHDD and Spinrite on my brand new dell and neither would recognize either of the 2 HD in the computer???? I do not understand.

I hate to admit that I have declared more than one clients hdd dead after mhdd would not see it! What could be the problem?

Thanks

Wil

[vdub12]

Sounds like you don't have a compatible controller.

You might need to find a more compatible test system of find a driver that will work. Making that driver work on each type of boot CD might be a problem. I would vote for a more compatible test system myself. Personally I use an old custom system I built my dad years ago. we recently upgraded his system and I used the old parts to build a new test system. Its an A7V-8X with an Athlon 2000+ and 1.5Gb of ram. Its a quick system and does really well. So far I have had no problems with it. However, it does not have a SATA controller on it. I think I may add a PCI controller when the time comes. I have not had a situation where I needed to test a hard drive outside of a system. I normally I just test the drives inside the customers system.

[MobileTechie]

MHDD can be tricky to use. It doesnt work on the primary IDE by default for starters. You really have to read the manual before using it.

If Seatools doesn't see a drive attached to the ATA/SATA bus then there really is a problem.