Motherboard will NOT find any harddrive I put in the machine

[ZowieHowie]

I just got a motherboard in the mail from a member of these forums.

The board was pulled from an HP, and came with a Celeron700 processor

When I have the board in the case, and hook everything up, it shows nothing in BIOS under primary master, secondary master, primary slave and secondary slave. I put in the harddrive info thiking that the board may need the harddrive to be user specified. That didnt work though.

I thought maybe it coudl be the IDE cable, so I switched those out, and there was no prblem with that. I actually hooked the CD drive to each IDE, to see if it was the controller, but it worked both times. Therefore, I know the IDE controllers are all working as well as the floppy, but none of the harddrives I hook up to the IDE cable work.

I also put in a Win98 startup disk, and booted from that. It said it couldnt find a drive with a valid partition. WHen I went to Fdisk, it found no fixed drives. Any ideas?

The BIOS is a Phoenix BIOS

 

[egale]

What kind of hard drive are you trying to install?

 

[ZowieHowie]

standard IDE. I tried a 2 gig, 4gig, and 9gig. They all work in my other systems

 

[BlackMountainCow]

[Just and idea:]

Back in the old days there was a kind of a "driver" needed for some motherboards to actually detect harddrives that passed the 1 GB border. I don't know if this applies to your mobo, but I once had the same problem. The boot partition had to be smaller than 600 MB (if i remeber that corectly) and the "driver" made the rest of the HD accesible to the OS.

So maybe if u put that HD into another PC, partition it and make the designated boot partition just 500 MB big, maybe it'll find it then. If not, maybe there is such a "driver" for your mobo somewhere ...

[/Just an idea:]

 

[ZowieHowie]

just tried that. same problem as before

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Darn ... then I'm outa ideas. Gonna ask a buddy of mine if he has some more.

 

[Big Lar]

Have you checked the Jumper position on the back of the drive, to make sure it is set correctly?

 

[pspada]

What type of ribbion cable are you using? I've seen many systems that either needed the high density 80-pin cables for the hard drives to work properly - and some that could not use the newer 80-pin cables and had to use the older 40-pin ones.

Also, some systems need the drives to be set to "Cable select" instead of Master/Slave.

 

[ZowieHowie]

I tried everything, and nothing seems to be working. any ideas?

 

[pspada]

Maybe theres a bios update for the board that will help?