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Getting 440BX/P3 system to work with old 4GB HDD

S

stateofbeasley

Senior member
I have an old Pentium III system that I'm trying to refurbish for some relatives. It's got a generic 440BX motherboard, DVD drive, CDRW drive, 3COM LAN, and 3COM modem. There's no HDD and no video card.

I dug up an old Western Digital Caviar 34300 drive (4.3 GB Capacity) and an 8MB ATI Rage PCI something or the other.

System posts fine and I can go into BIOS. All the drives are recognized, including the 4.3 GB one. Problem is that I can't install Windows. The system just sits there when I'm trying to install. The HDD activity light will flash but the drive doesn't make any sounds at all. I don't think the drive itself is dead since it spins up and doesn't make any awful noises - I also know that the drive worked fine in an old Pentium MMX box that recently bit the dust due to the power supply simply not turning on one day.

What's the best course of action here? What could be wrong? I'm thinking a new HDD would be easiest...
 
some of the BX systems would not boot from CD, also you need to make sure that the HDD is partishoned (sorry spelling) and formated correctly before you install windows or whatever.
 
Get a Win98SE DOS disk with CD drivers from www.bootdisk.com. You may need to use FDISK to create the partition then FORMAT /S (/s to copy system).

You might even need to copy the CD to the HD if you don't remember the steps to setting up CD drivers on the HD (copying MSCDEX, defining AUTOEXEC and CONFIG).
 
I am not sure that that particular hard drive is affected but WD hard drives are known to require special jumper configuration if they are the only drive on the IDE channel. The usual cure is to remove the jumper completely.
 
Do just what Dave Simmons recommends...how ever.....I would do fdisk twice.....first time fdisk/mbr just incase u have a damaged boot sector....then fdisk to partiion...then format/s to format and make a system disk.
 
Hmm I can boot the system from a Windows 2000 CD but windows just won't install. The drive is a master and the other drive on that channell is a ZIP drive. There are no jumpers on the drive as far as I can tell.

Maybe the drive is somehow incompatible with the motherboard, though I don't see why it would be.
 
Originally posted by: stateofbeasley
I dug up an old Western Digital Caviar 34300 drive (4.3 GB Capacity) and an 8MB ATI Rage PCI something or the other.

System posts fine and I can go into BIOS. All the drives are recognized, including the 4.3 GB one. Problem is that I can't install Windows. The system just sits there when I'm trying to install. The HDD activity light will flash but the drive doesn't make any sounds at all. I don't think the drive itself is dead since it spins up and doesn't make any awful noises.
Click to expand...
I'm looking at a similar 4.3, the Caviar 24300. It requires a jumper to share an ATA controller cable. Put the jumper on the third (counting from the power jack over) pin set. I just got rid of an old 440BX that always gave me fits when I tried using it. Mine did have a 2X AGP slot, though.

There is an interesting aspect to the BIOS on that old machine, and probably others its age. You may see it has picked up the correct ID for the hard drive when you look at the first, general settings, screen. But it is not going to "write" that ID out to itself. You have to go to the page/screen set aside for identifying hard drives, wait for that to do its thing (mine required me to step it through all four possible ATA drives, or at least hit Escape for the one, two, or three others it didn't have), then select the "Save/Exit" option.

😎
 
The Caviar is dead... I can't get it to work under Windows or Red Hat Linux. Neither could format or partition the drive. So I threw in an old Fujitsu that I dug up and Windows 2000 is installing fine.

This system is going to be awesome! 4.3 GB HDD and ATI Rage Pro 8MB for a fast 3D experience!
 
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