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BIOS will not detect my hard drive

A

ath50

Member
When I boot up, on the first screen it finds "None" for both Primary Master and Primary Slave. On the second (or maybe its third screen), it lists the hard drive. Its a 40gig WD. The computer does boot into Windows 98 and I can read everything off of the hard drive normally, but I cannot install Windows 2k because it doesn't find the hard drive. Assuming I need to get the BIOS to detect it and then I should be fine...any suggestions?
 
here are a a few things you can try first make sure it is jumpered correctly the hard drive will have a chart of what it should be jumpered at. or you could reformat the drive or remove the cmos battery and unplug it from the wall for about 1 to 2 days these might help
 
Thanks for the help,

I did check the jumpers. There are only three settings, one for slave, one for master with slave, and normal is just with no jumper. I've tried all three and none of them make it work so I have it with no jumper right now.

I just formatted it last night and it still didn't detect...and I have a recent version of BIOS flashed.

Pulling the CMOS battery out sounds like a good idea, might try that in a little bit if nothing else is working.
 
On the first page of your BIOS, where it shows "None" for your hard drive; have you tried changing that to "Auto"?

alzan
 
If it shows the hard drive on the "second screen" that means you have an additional controller on your motherboard, like a promise controller. If so, you need to give win2k the drivers for it when you start loading it. (when it says Press F6 for additional, you have to press F6). Or you could just hook your hard drive up to your two main ide plugs. What model motherboard is this?
 
If the suggestion in alzan's post doesn't work, look for an option somewhere in your BIOS called "Delay IDE Initial" or similar wording.

Setting this number higher will allow more time for your drives to be recognized.

I think johnjkr1 nailed it though.
 
I have it set to auto in BIOS, sorry for not clarifying, I mean it shows "None" on the first screen when you boot up.

I have an ASUS A7V motherboard for Socket A processors. And yeah, the 2nd page where it finds the hard drive is under the promise controller (though I don't know much about that). Is there a way to update the promise controller or something? Even if I got a promise controller for Windows 2k, wouldn't BIOS still be unable to detect the drive on startup?
 
Plug the hard drive's data cable into the motherboard's own native IDE controllers instead of the Promise controller, and the problem should be solved 🙂 If you really want to use the Promise controller instead, download the drivers in Zip format from Asus (go to the Drivers tab and you want Promise Ultra 100 IDE Controller Driver V2.00.0 (Build 18)), extract the drivers from the Zip file onto a floppy, and press F6 at the first blue screen of Windows Setup. After a few minutes it'll prompt for the drivers on the floppy.
 
"Even if I got a promise controller for Windows 2k, wouldn't BIOS still be unable to detect the drive on startup"

The promise bios and the system bios are two seperate things, if you plug a drive into a promise controller it will not show up in the system bios. Follow Mechbgon's instructions and your problems will be solved.
 
Ok 🙂

Made a little progress, but still not working all the way.

In the motherboard manual it lists the 4 IDE controllers as:

"2 IDE Connectors (UltraDMA/66Support)"
and
"2 IDE Connectors (UltraDMA/100Support)"

The Promise chip is listed as "Promise Ultra DMA/100 Chip"

The floppy drive and DVD and CDRW drives are plugged into the UltraDMA/66Support connectors while the hard drive is in an UltraDMA/100Support connector. The other one is empty.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I got the Win 2k drivers and it successfully found the drive and started to go through the setup process, but after the first round of rebooting, it got halfway through the test to configure "devices like the mouse and keyboard" and it froze. And it continues to freeze at the halfway mark every time.
 
Just completely ignore the promise controller slot (the udma/100) and plug all your drives into the udma66 controllers. Then you won't have any problems. (of course, this assumes you have the master/slave jumpers set correctly)
Also, floppy drives dont go into IDE controllers...they go into floppy controllers, which are physically smaller (unless you have an LS120 drive)
 
Yeah I just checked and it was the old zip disk drive (that I never got working, but didn't care much about) that was in the second one.

Just removed that and plugged the hard drive in its place and BIOS found it fine. Thanks alot of the help johnjkr1 and mechBgon. 🙂
 
No problem, you wont get the full ata-100 performance without using the promise controller, but you aren't losing that much overall.
 
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