Can you ruin a hard drive by setting the jumpers wrong??

[Kaieye]

Or by adding another jumper when only one is needed?? I worked on a PC that had a new 40 gig hard drive but the BIOS says only 33 gig's are seen. Later on when I set the jumpers correctly, the BIOS doesn't see anything anymore and just locks up. This was done on a first generation Soyo BX chipset mb. I did try this same hard drive on a known working Abit BH6 which I know has no issues and the same lockup occurred again.

What do you think?

Thanks for reading.

 

[arcenite]

1. You cannot destroy a drive by setting jumpers wrong (Master/Slave/Auto jumpers atleast)
2. A 40 gig drive will not show up as 40 gigs, it will show up as a little less... Though that sounds like almost 25% of the drive is being taken up...

Bill

 

[Ionizer86]

40.0"GB" should show up as 37.25GB according to Windows (which considers 1024B = 1KB)

Try setting different jumper combinations: master, cable select, no jumper, etc.

 

[Ghost]

On a WD hard drive a year or so ago, I made a mistake when setting the jumpers. The BIOS reported the drive as having a lot less capacity then it should have. Once the jumpers were correctly set, everything worked fine.

I work in support, and over the years have mis-set jumpers on several occasions. The drive/s won't be seen properly, but I have never encountered any that have been damaged as a result of that.