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BIOS won't recognize new WD 60GB HD

G

gyoung

Member
I just got a great deal at Best Buy for a new WD 60GB 5400 RPM HD for $50 after rebate. The problem is that the BIOS won't recognize the drive.

Anyone have any experience installing one of these drives?

I have a Abit KT7-RAID motherboard. Currently I have an IBM 30GB 7200 RPM drive on IDE3 as the boot drive (jumpered as master), a DVD on IDE1 (jumpered as master), and a CDRW on IDE2 (jumpered as master). I would like to put the new HD on IDE4 and jumper it as master.

I've tried doing that and it won't recognize the drive. It hangs at the Highpoint BIOS. I figured it could be the Highpoint BIOS, so I decided to remove all the other IDE devices and place the WD on IDE1 to get it off the Highpoing controller. The Abit BIOS wouldn't recognize it either. Here are the messages that I received:



<< Primary Master: Not detected
Primary Slave: Not detected
Secondary Master: Not detected
Secondary Slave: Not detected >>



I decided to try and slave it to the IBM drive and put both on IDE3 just to see what would happen. When I jumpered it as slaved and put it on the same ribbon as the IBM the BIOS detected it. Not sure what is up. I've tried the alternate jumper settings recommended by WD and tried removing the jumper all together. Still nothing. Am I missing something.

I also upgraded my Abit BIOS to the latest 64 BIOS just to make sure that wasn't causing a problem.
 
I spoke with WD tech support and they said they have found a problem and the engineers are working on a fix. They took my name, address, and email information and said they would inform me of a fix when it is available. She mention the mailing out of a special IDE cable that has been modified to work around the problem.

She also told me to allow set the drive up as slaved in the meantime until they have the fix information available.
 
try not to put the jumper to master. Try to put it on cable select. I had a lot of problems also last time with the 80 gig one. I got it fixed by accident when I put it to cable select.


it doesn't make sense but it works so 🙂



Darno
 
Nope, check out my above post. It is a confirmed problem with my motherboard and the WD HD. I'm following there advice and it is slaved to my other HD right now.
 
My GF had the same problem. She didn't think it was so funny when it worked on my computer and then I teased her for bringing bad luck to HD's (there's been other incidents...) At least I didn't shout "MOOOOOVE" to get her out of the way. 😀

Nevertheless, the above forums do suggust a temporary workaround that should allow the drive to be recognized by your BIOS. Get an old 40-pin IDE cable (or 80-pin cable) and cut pin 1, which should be the red wire on the IDE cable (or pins 1 and 2 for the 80-pin cable). And that's it.. install your hard drive as you normally would. Click here for more information regarding any potential downsides to this action.

I tried it on my GF's computer and it actually worked. This is reported to be the modification in the cable that Western Digital is mailing out. They should supposedely have a firmware fix for this issue sometime soon. 😉
 
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