Help Please! Board has trouble detecting HD

[groovin]

I can set the board on auto to auto detect the HD on boot. every other time the comp is booted, it will not find the primary master (hd). then i set the board to user and have it detect all the params of the HD... once again every it will not find the primary master many times. when i go back into bios and check the standard cmos setup, the primary master says "not installed".

heres is what i have:

ECS K7s5a w/AMIBIOS 12/15/2001 s w/a Duron 1GHZ
WD 20 Gig HD

HD is wired to IDE1 on the mo bo, jumper set to master. CDROM is connected to IDE2, set to master (detects in bios as secondary master).

Ive tried many different boot sequences, I left it at IDE-0, CDROM for the time being. bios set to auto detect HD on start up (works a bit better).

Thanks

 

[groovin]

no one has any ideas??

 

[amdskip]

Hard drive could be dead possibly. That ide channel on the motherboard could also be dead. Try it without hooking up the cd-rom.

 

[Suki]

If the HDD by itself on that ribbon, try setting the HDD jumper on factory default not on Master

 

[groovin]

thanks guys... ill try those out...

any other possible causes? i dont want to return the drive or board because the computer is in use so much.

 

[NukemAll]

Try added a delay in your bios for hard drive initualization. Sometimes 1 second is all it takes to give your drive enough time to complete it's initualization, which must be complete before the BIOS can detect it.

 

[groovin]

i dont think i ever remember seeing a HD utilization choice in the bios, is it called something else?
woudl i find it in chipset features or cmos setup?

thankss