Hard drive detection problems

[ZetaEpyon]

I'm having trouble getting a computer that I am working on to detect a Western Digital WD400BB 40GB hard drive. It works fine with the 2 Seagate Cheetah drives that are installed in I, but the BIOS will simply not recognize that the IDE drive is present. I have tried just about every cable hookup combination that I can think of, and nothing has worked.

The 40GB drive is the only IDE device that the system will have hooked to it. The motherboard is an Asus microATX Socket-7 motherboard, though I am not entirely sure which exact model it is.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!!

 

[boomerang]

I would look carefully at the jumper settings on the drive. You may want to check the WD site for jumper settings there. I have found that drives from several different manufacturers have bad information on the jumper labels.

 

[ZetaEpyon]

I have checked the jumpers against the listing on the drive itself, the included manual, and the WD website. They all concur with each other, but it should be showing up anyhow, since it is the only IDE drive in there...

Thanks for the advice though!

Anyone else have any ideas?

 

[Fallen Kell]

When was the last time you upgraded your motherboard BIOS?

The BIOS itself might not support a 40 gig drive if it is not new enough, and thus it wouldn't detect one (well in theory it would detect it, but only at the maximum size the BIOS supports, but like I said that is in THEORY not practice).

 

[Kenazo]

not to leech on your thread, but i'm in a similar bind. My gf's parent's p133 cooked it's HD, and they need a new one. I'm not sure, but if it only supports a certain size hd what do i do? those old, small hd's are hard to come by, and when u do find one, it's usually crap anyway. Do most mobo's have bios updates that will correct this, or do i have to keep looking for an old used one?

ps. hope u don't mind Epyon, i just figured my question was so close to yours no point starting a new thread.

 

[jfunk]

One thing to check, since this is WD....WD drives MUST be jumpered as SINGLE drive, not MASTER if they are alone on the cable.

Second thing to check would be BIOS update...kinda old board may not detect a drive that size.

For both of you guys, if this turns out to be a problem, all HD manufacturers, (as far as I know), have software that lets you use larger drives on systems with BIOS' that don't support them.

Maxtor's is called MAXBLAST, for example.

They work most of the time, although certain BIOS' won't even let you fudge the info required for the software to work. I have only had this problem with wacky namebrand machines that have non-standard BIOS' (like HPs and COMPAQS, etc..).

Your drive should have come with said software if it was in a retail box....it should be available for download from their site if not.

j

edit: WD Data Lifeguard Tools

 

[veryape]

Try setting the hard drive to Normal in the bios instead of Auto or whatever options there are, because some drives require it to be set to Normal to be detected. It might not work but it might, so you should try it.

Kenazo, you can still usually use a larger drive in older systems, you just need to update the bios, although some systems will still only recognize 8.8 gigs of the drive, but at least it will work.

[EDIT]Both you guys should also try putting the drives information in manually, ie typing in the number of cylinders, heads and sectors, which you can either get from your manual or from the net at your hard drives manufacturers website.

Again, Good Luck
John-Paul AKA veryape

 

[Frontrunner]

I have the same problem with my WD.. ITs sitting right here in front of me. Same Hard Drive. 1st WD hard drive I got was last Saturday. IT was bad so I ran back to Best Buy and exchanged it. Went to out to my dads work (Computer Tech) and he loaded Windows 2k,Adobe and a whole bunch of high $$$ programs. So I know it works but my Abit KT7A-Raid wont pick it up.

 

[DIRTsquirt]

i have wd100 and a wd30 on my kr7a. both set to master (jumper to the far right) on seperate ide chanels of the raid... they work swimmingly..
If you are meaning you copied the win2k cd to the drive to ease install and you are using the raid conroller. You are still gonna have to load win2k from cd or boot disks.. cause any drive on the raid controller wont be recognized until the drivers for the raid controller are loaded.. this is done by hitting f6 when prompted in the install process .
win2k asks if you have an scsi devices... win2 treats these raid controllers as scsi devices..
good luck you have a nice board!
doh! this is for frontrunners benefit sorry about the thread crapping.