Jumper settings -or- my harddrive won't boot :(

[BonoMan]

Well I think I may have found the answer but I'm not at the location to test it right now so I'll ask this anyway out of curiosity.

I was building a new system and when booting up the bios would detect the harddrive when I went INTO the bios..but when it went to boot up and load the OS it wouldn't detect it at all (it's a single drive setup so it's the master drive).

I reset the CMOS and tried everythign else possible.

then I realized the jumpers may be wrong (although I was POSITIVE i had them set to master).

I checked WD's site and then realized that for a single drive setup, to declare teh drive master, there were to be no jumpers at all on the disc.

So my question is should the jumpers affect the bootability of a disc in a single drive setup if the jumpers are set to master drive for a dual drive setup?

If so why isn't the jumper setting for master and slave just universal regardless of the amount of drives in the setup?

 

[THUGSROOK]

I checked WD's site and then realized that for a single drive setup, to declare teh drive master, there were to be no jumpers at all on the disc.

no explaination ~ thats just the way it is
(no jumper for single drive)

 

[John]

If your motherboard bios sees the HDD, then you should be fine. What OS are you trying to install? Have you tried booting to the cdrom to run setup?

 

[BonoMan]

The problem is fixed now..it was the jumper definitely.

The BIOS would see it..although it hesitated a bit before it did...but after the jumper removal it's pretty instant.

I had just gotten a new P4PE mobo with a P4 and installing XP.

When I inserted the bootable XP disc..it would go through all the normal motions and copy all the files to the disc...then you know how it goes thruogh that "hit enter to restart and remove all floppys"

well once it did that it would, obviously, try to boot from the HD to finish installing XP only, even though the BIOS and the windows install SAW it just fine...it couldn't read it as a bootable disc.

now fixed though.