Hardware failure… Again!
Filed Under (Hardware) by cranst on 24-04-2006
Yesterday, I was pleasantly greeted with the following error on boot:
Hardware Initiate Failed. Please check device!!! The BIOS does not be installed.
I won’t go into Engrish humor here, but we’ll say it doesn’t translate well. Ultimately what is going on here is my RAID Controller is the first thing to load to get the SATA drives up and going to start the Operating System. Somewhere along the way, the RAID Controller didn’t start so no harddrive was detected, which as anyone familiar with computers knows, no harddrive means no workie workie. I did the usual Google research and found that many many, did I say many? many people have had the same issue. Some people have had their drives fail and others have had their SATA cables fail. Being the optimist, I switched my SATA cable for a spare one I had and booted the computer. This time it booted up as if nothing had ever happened. I love it when they do that because the whole time the thing is not working, it feels like the computer is working your last nerve, then at some point you realize this is not a person and hardware will fail from time to time. I just hate it when it is MY time. Perhaps it is because this same computer failed last weekend because of some other issue. We’ll see how long it goes before I post another issue.
I’m feeling the temptation. I want a Mac Mini. I’ll supress that urge for now, but soon, I will make that purchase. 
As a veteran of many such messages (I’m the first guy everyone within 50 miles brings their computers to. “Hi! I don’t know you make my ‘puter work please!”) I’ve learned the hardway to try replacing the cables (right after checking the connection) Immediately. It generally saves a lot of time, effort, and quarters from entering the ‘Cussing Jar’. I’m sure you have a great many more stories on the joys of “making this frickin’ box work!” genre, I’d love to hear ‘em!
I’ll be damned if it didn’t do this again. This time I only pulled the SATA plugs and reset them in place and it booted fine. Is this an undocumented feature of the SATA plugs?