So... iDeneb basically damaged my hard drive somehow?! Doesn't seem possible.

Has anyone had this problem before? It installed just fine, but when it went to reboot at the end, it gave me my normal "BOOT ERROR... INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER". I'd hate to lose all my data on this disk. I installed it on a separate partition formatted HFS+.

Now the hard drive is not displayed in BIOS or Ubuntu LiveCD or Windows recovery console. How can I access this drive?

Weird, what happend?

That's impossible. The hard drive would be displayed in the bios even if all the data on the disk were corrupted.

I would open up your computer and check that no cables are loose. It's more likely that this is just a coincidence.

If not, there is the infinitesimally small possibility that your hard drive's firmware somehow got corrupted, which would require warranty service or a controller board swapout.

I tested all the connections... the hard drive does run and spin on startup and when it's plugged in if the power's on.

When starting the Ubuntu Live CD (and when running various tools in the Ultimate Boot CD) I get this error and it cancels the Ubuntu startup: SRST failed (errno=-16)
However, if the drive is unplugged the error never shows up and I can run the CD just fine.

When running the iDeneb DVD again and doing verbose mode, it now doesn't work and says "Still waiting for root device.", which is the same error I got when trying iAtkos before.

I tried plugging it into different SATA ports but that did nothing.

I also tried mounting it through Ubuntu with the mount command but it doesn't think the drive is connected.

All I need to to do is access the drive somehow. After backing it up the drive can be erased and restarted (although I can't erase it if it isn't detected by any software).

Any info is good, 8 hrs trying to get into this drive so far and no progress, would be happy if there's some solution.

Try resetting all your BIOS settings to default.

There is no way that any tool is going to work on your drive if its not detected in the bios, so that would have to come first.

Do you have another computer to try the drive in? It's possible that the issue lies in your SATA controller.

I had already reset BIOS to default.

The SATA DVD drive shows up and I can boot from it, just not the drive...would that mean the SATA controller works? I've swapped the HDD and DVD SATA conections and the DVD drive works in both spots.

Tomorrow I should be able to test the drive on another computer so I'll see if that works at all.

Did you ever get this problem fixed? I'm having the same problem with my SATA HD.

I'm about to send it back to the manufacturer or Amazon since it wasn't that long ago that I bought it. Of course, I would rather learn how to correct the problem rather than just give up and get a new one.