I have an Ali5 chipset board (P1 MMX) and I was working on it. I turned it off, did some things, turned it on and it said the HD wasn't detected. I tried another port nothing. I pulled a HD from a machine in storage that I remember to be working, it wasn't detected either.

To start ruling things out I swapped cables, ports, and even plugged in a Promise PCI controller card. Nothing would detect the drives. Then I returned the drive I pulled from the working machine and it wouldn't detect the drive!

I then used a SATA-to-IDE adapter and plugged in a 500gb drive. The Promise controller card detected the drive, however, many times when I plugged the drive into the onboard IDE port, powering on the computer, it flickered on, then off and wouldn't turn on. Disconnecting it, the machine still wouldn't power on. Then about 25 seconds later it would.

Could there be some sort of power surge going through the onboard IDE? Is it really destroying my drives?