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New Hard Drive = PC won't POST?

tracerbullet

tracerbullet

Golden Member
The setup in brief: Biostar board with VIA KT-400 chipset (and a 2Gig Athlon). 200GB WD drive.

The issue: With this new drive attached, PC freezes on the Biostar logo during the POST. It's the very first thing that happens, a second after hitting the power button. Can't even get to the screen that shows the drive setup, amount of RAM, etc.

Tried / verified so far:
* Another cable (new cable, new style with the blue / gray / black ends)
* Verified that jumper setting is correct (no jumper = single master, and drive is going in alone)
* Drive is definitely spinning up
* Latest BIOS from the Biostar site

The current 40GB drive runs and works A-OK, has Windows installed, etc. But you plug in this new one, and bam - nothing happens. No POST, nothing. Freezes about a second into the boot process and that's that.

Is it possible this drive is physically too big for the board to handle? I would have thought it might limit it down if that was the case, but not freeze during bootup?

All ideas and input welcome!


Thanks
 
Tried CS (cable select)?

Pretty sure that even if the BIOS doesnt like its size it would just show up as a 137 gig . Or maybe the drive is dead, have you checked it in another comp as a slave?
 
If it's the only HD on the channel, pull the jumper. It's a WD thing.

Opsys?

Even if the BIOS is Ok, you need SP4 (W2K) or better to take advantage of that size. And I think SP1a(?) in XP to see it all.

The software from WD should also allow you to get beyond theBIOS limitations, but to take advantage of the whole drive you'll need the SP installed to get to it all.
 
Cable select is a great idea, hadn't thought of that. We did set the drive up with no jumpers (which = master without slave, perfect sicne it's all that was on the cable). I understand about not seeing the fulldrive - it's Xp with SP2. But we can't get that far. There's nothing software can do right now, since it freezes within about 1 sec of hitting the power button. It doesn't even POST. Good ideas though.

We'll try cable select first. It's a friend's PC, so failing that yes I'm sure it'll end up piggybacked onto my machine to see if the drive is functioning at all.

Thanks for the ideas!
 
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