Xp installation cannot find ide hard drive

[Guest]

Hello,
My computers motherboard got fried a while back so I got a new one installed from a pc shop. They also reinstalled xp for me. Been working fine up until recently when I had to update norton. Once I installed my new norton and tried updating its protection it completely collapsed my xp so I had to try and re install xp mysellf only to find the same symptoms that many other xp installers appear to be suffering from. On installation process my hard drive was not detected. I tried other routes such as changing the bios settings disable sata control in the peripheral settings and I also tried making my own xp install cd including the drivers needed for the xp installl to be able to detect the hard drive but was unsuccesssful. I couldn't copy the drivers neeeded onto a floppy drive neither as I don't have one. Ancient technlogy. So I looked inside my pc and found something surprising. When the shop who installed my new mother board, also installed a seperate ide card which my hard drive connetcted directly into rather than going direct to the mother board. I have 2 cd devices which are connetected together and then go to the IDE slot direct on my mother board, As a long shot and at my wits end and very reluctant to hand my pc into the shop again I decied to move one of the sets of 2 cables attaching my seceond cd drive and attach them to my IDE hard drive which then directly connected my hard drive to my mother board. I figured it was a long shot but happily surprised I ran my normal xp cd and it fired up and got beyond the dreaded stage of starting my installation only to find that the hard drive was not detected and went on from there to allow me to format and reinstall xp without any additional drivers or any reconfiguring the bios settings. Appologies for obvious lack of pc literate terms. I am not a pc techie not by along shot but im not stupid neither with a pc. After alot of research on the net for me it came to to a little look at the internal wiring so might be worth a look inside to see if your hard drive connects direct to your mother board or through a seperate IDE card. I hope this helps. Any responce grately appreciated at billy_dyet@yahoo.com Criticism also taken on the chin but please bare in mind as I said I am not a techie. Best of luck

 

[tigsounds]

You may have more IDE devices than available ports on the new motherboard. IDE is a dying technology. Most of today's motherboards either have one port or none. If the shop saw you needed more IDE ports, they would have put another PCI card in to accommodate your IDE devices.

When you start swapping cables, there is opportunity to do it incorrectly. IDE cables support up to two devices, one master, one slave. The devices must have their identity pins set correctly. There is usually a sticker on the drive, or, in the case of CD ROM drives, it may be stamped in the housing, a diagram showing where the pins need to be for the function of the device as either Master or Slave (or cable select).

Since the shop put your hard drive used to run Windows on an add-on card, you needed to have a driver disk handy when installing Windows. Very early in the setup, you saw a message at the bottom of the screen to push the F6 key to add the drivers for that card. The shop should supply you with the drivers for the card they installed (you paid for it). Now-days, a person Slipstreams the drivers in the install CD so pressing the F6 key is unnecessary, but you still need to have the drivers for that card the shop installed to make a slipstream CD.

If you put your system hard drive on the motherboard IDE port, that F6 driver would be unnecessary. Later after Windows was installed, the drivers would be needed to activate the devices plugged into the add-on card.

It gets worse.. Some add-on cards will handle a hard drive, but not ATAPI devices (such as CD roms).