A7M266 won't detect HDD

[Snolan]

I'm down to the last straw. I recently purchased an A7M266 and 1.33 AMD T-Bird along with DDR RAM. I intended to upgrade my A7V. My intent was to keep the WORKING and BOOTING HDD and boot initially before reloading my OS (98SE).

I then installed the new MB, CPU, and RAM. I cannot get the BIOS to detect my HDD. It is a Seagate Barracuda ATA II, and not some generic. The IDE LED blinks initially at power up and I can hear it spinning. The CPU is detected and the RAM is fine. However, when POST attempts to detect the Primary and Secondary IDEs, the message indicates failure. Thus, when it attempts to boot I get the following message:

DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

Here are the tests I've tried:
- I've used multiple ATA100/66 cables, one of which worked on the old MB to no avail
- I've set the CHS settings manually and still nothing happens (I haven't tried PIO 3 or 4)
- I rebuilt my PC with old the old A7V motherboard to check if the HDD was damage during the upgrade with the same old cable. It works fine.

I remember an issue like this on my A7V. The A7V has 4 IDE Ports. One Primary and Secondary Pair is Promise ATA100 and the other pair is plain IDE. The ATA 100 IDE ports would not boot from my HDD. I was forced to use the old IDE Ports to boot up and install the Promise ATA Controller drivers. I then connected the HDD to the ATA 100 IDE port. After this, the MB BIOS still would not detect any IDE devices, however a new Promise detection occured after the MB BIOS. The Promise detection would find the HDD.

I don't have this luxury with the A7M it only has two ATA100/66/33 IDE ports.

Does the A7M266 MB BIOS detect the ATA100/66/33 IDE Ports or is there some other PCI Bus Master detection that needs to be activated? Is there a problem with the controler and thus the MB defective?

I'm in dire need and am most likely gonna return the Board.

 

[Darkluck]

Try installing a different HDD and see if it can be recognized, if not the chances are good that it is the HDD controller on the MB.

Otherwise, try booting into dos and see if the drive is there, if not run fdisk and check there too. If you can also do fdisk /mbr and see if that helps. Good Luck and keep us posted with more info.