So I bought a cheapo GENERIC hard drive back in september, and Sunday when I boot the machine up, the BIOS wasn't recognizing it at all. I try swapping power cables, IDE connectors, setting the jumper to slave, then back to master.... Nothing.
So for fun I take the jumper out and start the machine up without any setting, it still doesn't detect the drive. But I shut it down again, put the jumper back into its correct setting, boot it up, and presto, it is recognized.
So a friend of mine has a very BS-sounding explanation for all of this, but I want to see what y'all thought, before I add in his 2 cents.