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Can you flash a hard drive??

R

redly

Golden Member
I've got a 20GB hard drive that was sent to me as a warranty replacement for a hard drive in a Compaq Presario...not sure about the model number, but it was a 500mhz P3 machine.

By the time the new drive arrived, I had already installed a replacement drive in the PC, so this drive has just been sitting around. I tried to install it into my PC, but it won't talk to my computer. Works fine in the Compaq PC I have checked and rechecked the jumpers, cables, and settings, so I'm wondering if this drive is flashed to only work with the Compaq PC.

Is there a way to overcome this?

THe drive is a Maxtor Fireball3, ATA133, 5400RPM, 20GB
 
What kind of pc are you trying to install the drive in? Motherboard model? When you say it doesnt work, Is it read by bios on new machine? Did you partition and format the drive? It should work on any computer if jumpered correctly.

And it is very rare to find a firmware update for a hard drive for the end user, and for only specific types of drives.
 
I once ran into an oddity something like yours on an HP. What cured it was zeroing the MBR. I used the setup software downloaded from the HD manufacturers site. The reason the "zeroing" function is included is priimarily to blank out different/incompatible "disk manager" code than the one the particular HD manufacturer provides for HDs that exceed the maximum an old BIOS can handle. Higher level software (including the HD manufacturers "easy setup") is supposed to work WITH the "disk manager", so it WON'T remove it. Most partitioning programs and OSes work on the higher level, which leads to a lot of bafflement when you try to fix the MBR.

The Master Boot Record (=MBR) contains the partition table, which is just a few bytes, and a tiny, initial boot loader that starts off the process of booting from the HD. A standard MBR just finds and loads another (more elaborate) boot loader that is on the first partition marked ACTIVE, but you can do some tricky things instead. I don't know what HP was up to with what they did. The HD itself was 100% standard otherwise.
 
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