I've got two SATA drives - one SSD and one 2.5". The SSD is my C drive and is working fine; the other, a Western Digital Scorpio (blue I think) 500GB just suddenly wasn't detected. I tried a different SATA port, different SATA cable, to no avail. Also tried changing the SATA mode to AHCI from IDE, which resulted in no hard drives detected at all, so I changed it back to IDE.
It wasn't making any suspect noises, and was working perfectly fine right up til I shut the system down last night. Can a virus do this, or does it sound more like a mechanical failure? Anything else I can do to troubleshoot? The point may well be moot, if it isn't the power cable I'm not sure I can do anything with it.