Bad HDD or Mobo... or both....

[tastim]

I just bought a heap of new components to put together another PC..... hoping I would throw them together, flip on the power and be on my way....... no such luck this time.

What's new:
Athlon 1.1 ghz
Shuttle mainboard
512mb single Dimm PC133 ram (Kingston)
MSI Geforce 4 440MX SE blah blah
Enlight 360 watt PSU

What's used (in old systems)
WD 40GB 5400 rpm HD
old pos CD-rom
old pos floppy
Sound Blaster Live Value
10/100 NIC

On to the problem....

With HDD on IDE1 and CD on IDE2, hard drive gets a disk boot failure. With HDD on IDE2 and CD on IDE1, HDD boots up, however, no CD drive shows up in the drop down menu when asked to Browse for the Windows 98 CD while installing drivers....

To me, this suggests a bad IDE port...... but what's making me unsure of myself is that last system the hard drive was in, had a LOT of strange problems, that I eventually diagnosed as HD related...and replacing it seems to solve that system's issues.....

Any input much appreciated...

 

[Javic]

Throw the HD on IDE2 as master and the CD as the slave on IDE2, leaving IDE1 empty and give it a whirl. If the system installs and runs fine, then you've got a bad IDE port.

You can also download WD's <A HREF="http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp#dlgtools" target="_new">Data Lifeguard Tools</A> which will allow you to create a bootable diskette and then test the drive for errors.

 

[Crashman]

It sounds to me like you're totally lost.

OK, to begin with, Western Digital drives have a weird jumper configuration. For most drives, to use them singly, you have to remove the jumper completely or have it in the "spare jumper" partition where it does nothing. To use it as a master with slave, you change it to the "master" position, to set it as a slave with a different master, you have to set it to the "slave" position. The part you have to watch out for is that "master" and "single" are TWO DIFFERENT settings.

In BIOS you'll want to change your drives to "auto detected".

<font color=blue>Watts mean squat if you don't have quality!</font color=blue>

 

[tastim]

Will give it a shot and see what happens... thank you.

 

[tastim]

Yep Crash... that did it....... last system this drive was in had the HD as master and a dvd drive as slave...... I have em on seperate channels.

I also downloaded WD's diagnostic tools, so hopefully the problems this drive had before will be fixed too...

Again thanks.... you saved me a week's worth of RMA agony