'Hard disk fail' message on startup after Win2k install

[Fireloong]

So I brought down my Maxtor 20gb to put in my little brother's computer and I cleared the master boot record using FDISK /MBR to rid it of the GRUB boot loader that was previously on the hard drive. Anyway, after having installed Windows 2000 on the drive, it would start up, get to the Windows 2000 startup screen with the blue status bar and then give me a BSOD at the very end of the process then reboot. It did this to me a few times and then now it gives me a "Primary master hard disk fail' message on the BIOS startup screen. The weird thing is that the auto-detection detects the hard drive perfectly but however, my system won't recognize or boot off the hard drive after that. The hard drive isn't making any weird noises and sounds like it's starting up perfectly fine. I've tried it in several systems but I still get the same message. Anyone have any suggestions? Could the hard drive been fried in some way? Thanks.

 

[Skibby9]

if your HDD is ATA-100 or UDMA-5 (or better), win2k doesn't have native support for such a disk controller. Manually set your HDD to DMA mode 4 in your bios, save and exit, and try again. After you get it all to work, install a driver for ATA-100 (or appropriate) disk controller, reboot and readjust youir DMA setting as appropriate.

Apparently on my mobo (A7V133) 2 ide channels use the Promise ATA-100 controller (which win2k doesn't support at install time). When I found this problem, my first solution was to move the HDD to a non-ATA-100 ide channel. Solved everything until I could complete the install.

Hope this helps.

 

[Fireloong]

Thanks for replying. Turns out the hard drive just went bad. I ran PowerMax on the drive since the system wouldn't even recognize the drive after the initial detection in the BIOS and I got all sorts of error messages indicating that it had to be sent back in. Just my luck...