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can you help a 14 year old computer builder

G

gplracer

Golden Member
My friend's son it trying to build his first computer. He had the computer up and running. He went into the bios to detect the hdd but it said none. He then used the windows start up disk to get to an A>. When he goes to run fdisk it says not fixed disk present. What could be some of the possible problems? I can not get to his house until later this weekend and he is real anxious to get this thing running. I have been advising him over the phone so it is hard to imagine what could be wrong. Thanks Here are the specs
abit kt7
duron 650
western digital hard drive (brand new)
 
If it is the only HDD in the system then it should be jumpered correctly from the factory. However check the diagram on the HDD itself. Make sure the ATA66 cable has the blue end connected to the motherboard, and the other end to the HDD. Go to BIOS and under CMOS setup set all IDE to AUTO. Check the boot sequence....check power connections. When you have an unpartitioned HDD it will usually say "no fixed disk present....blah blah" and then continue.
 
Either

1: a bad hard drive

2: incorect jumper settings on the drive

3: maybe a bad ide cable

4: ide cable not connected securely

5: possible power plug to the drive not connected or not connected securely.
 
if it's a WD hard drive make sure it's set to "stand alone" as WD's don't work when set to master(when alone on the ide chain)
 
make sure the red line (channel 1) is connected to pin 1 on the Motherboard ide slot and also on the hard drive. Just check the around the connector for the "1" or the cable connecter has a slot and so might the cable. Check that first

Make sure that there is power to the hard drive and when you turn the system on, make sure you can hear the Hard drive spinning up.

 
It has a cd rom on the cable with it. The cd rom is set to slave and the Western Digital hdd is at the factory default which I think is single master. Thanks guys i sent him an email and gave him the address of this thread. Anandtech is the best!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Thanks for the tip e-phex, you probably saved me some grief, I'll be assembling a PC later in the week and I changed the jumper on the WD drive to Master out of habit. Since it'll be the only drive on that IDE channel, I'll be switching it back now. 😀. Thanks.
 
NOTE for WD : on HDDs, there is single, and then there is master. there is also slave and cable select. single is not the same as master. default is single.

CD-ROMs have master = single.
 
hehe🙂

Go into the bios and make sure the settings are on auto detect harddrives. I had the same problem when I was building my computer.

 
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