HDD not recognized by BIOS?

[Kadarin]

Hi All,

Just had a frustrating night. A while back I exchanged my MSI K7T266Pro-RU for an Asus A7V266-E thinking that the primary IDE controller had died (thinking so because Win2K was writing entires to the Event Log with regard to not being able to write to either the master or the slave on the primary IDE). After the exchange, for a couple of weeks all was good, but the day before yesterday, the problem started up again. Swapping IDE cables has no affect.

So, last night I installed one of the new Maxtor 5400rpm 160GB ATA133 drives, and when I go to power up again, the BIOS now does not recognize the primary master (where the OS is). Actually, to correct myself, if I go into the BIOS and have it auto detect, sometimes it picks it up and most of the time it does not.

Given that the problem has happened on 2 motherboards, with different IDE cables, my suspicion is that I have either 1 or 2 bad Western Digital drives. Grrrr. Do you all concur, or is there something else I should be looking for?

System info:

Athlon XP 1800+ (OC to 140mhz FSB) w/Alpha PAL8045 & Sunon fan, AS-2
Asus A7V266-E w/512MD Corsair PC2100 (single stick)
Elsa GeForce 3 & SB Audigy MP3+
CoolerMaster aluminum case
Win2K Server, SP2

Thanks for any feedback!

-j

 

[foofoo]

definitely sounds like a hd problem to me. i recall that wd drives have a problem if they are set to master with no slave present. if you are using the wd as a single drive on an ide port, set the jumper to single or cable select. this should solve it i hope
good luck

 

[Kadarin]

Thank you! That appears to have done the trick. The BIOS recognized the drive right away and the machine booted right up. Since you've apparently just saved me about $200, you get a cookie.

🙂

-j

 

[foofoo]

glad that i could help. it's good when this forum stuff works.