HD detection problem arrg

[cojer]

I'm building a PC from old parts but have been having serious problems finding a HD that will work.


heres the story behind drive #4 (1st 2 were 1gb and definitely broken, #3 I thought was broken and after OS install it started losing data and crashing).

The drive had win98 installed. I know this drive worked fine in the previous PC it was in. When I install it in this new PC, it is not detected in bios. I have tried a couple different IDE cables. The drive IS powering up.

I then plugged it into the RAID array on this computer. It was detected fine in bios and installed fine in windows 2k. I formatted the drive with NTFS in windows, put it back in the new PC.. still not detected.

Is it possible that this is not a problem with the HD, but instead perhaps the anchient sound, video card, ram, or mobo? The mobo and ram worked fine during their previous use.

thanks for any suggestions.

 

[Crashman]

What motherboard? What hard drive? Did you set hard drive to Auto in BIOS before trying it on the main controller?

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[4Ryan6]

A BIOS flash may solve the problem if one is available for the older M/B, and it fixes a HDD recognizing issue. Also you have to have enough available room on the HDD to successfully install the OP/SYS, you've left out quite a few necessary details to successfully help you.

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[cojer]

ok sorry. The mobo is an abit bx6, hd is western digital WD300 30gb. currently all thats in the system is mobo, celeron 300a cpu, 1 stick pc133, CD drive, and the HD in question.

I took the drive out of the pc and put it in a working PC. I ran fdisk on it, created a new partition, and formatted it with NTFS in windows2000. I then reinstalled it in the system in question. It still was undetectable with jumper as master (same for CD drive though), but both were detected when jumper at Cable Select.

I proceeded to boot from CD and install windows 2000 pro on the HD. install went well except it had problems copying a couple files, but was ok after a retry or two.

Everything seemed to set itself up correctly.

Now that the os was installed, I booted it up for the 1st time fully installed. Now, whenever I try to access the HD (1st time I tried to get to control panel, 2nd 'my computer', etc..), the system immediately freezes.

This problem is pretty much exactly like a problem I was having before with this computer, but I attributed the problem to the HD being broken because I was having problems with it in a different system.. losing data and not being detected etc. now obviously though it looks to be something else, I guess a mobo problem. i'll post after flashing the bios.

 

[cojer]

I updated to newest bios.

BX6 BIOS QS
Version: QS Released Date: 2000-03-10

1. Fixes the incorrect capacity issue under Linux.
2. Fixes the incompatibility issue with Windows 2000.

after the bios was flashed, the utility rebooted the computer, and got Checksum error - defaults loaded.

I rebooted and it was gone.

windows loaded fine, but again it froze when I attempted to access control panel.

now i cant even get it to boot of A: I select A as 1st device to boot.. put in the boot disk, the drive is accessed disk read, but then it just skips it and boots from C. this happens even when C is not even in the list to be booted from.

 

[4Ryan6]

Thats because after you flash a bios, you should always clear the CMOS and rerun setup, reset the date, time, apply setup defaults, and reset all your CMOS settings, save and exit the CMOS, reboot.

<A HREF="http://forums.btvillarin.com/index.php?act=ST&f=41&t=2541" target="_new">My Rig</A>

 

[4Ryan6]

The BIOS flash was successful right?

<A HREF="http://forums.btvillarin.com/index.php?act=ST&f=41&t=2541" target="_new">My Rig</A>

 

[cojer]

the bios flash was successful as far as I know. The flash program didn't give any errors. The flash program reboot the system after it was finished. that is when I saw the checksum error. after that I turned it off and reset cmos using the cmos jumper.