No fixed disks present....but it's in there...

[The Dancing Peacock]

So I just got a 40gb drive for my sister's computer. I plug it in, boot up off a win98 setup disk, and get an error that the disk isn't formatted, or there's a virus, or something. I run fdisk, and it says no fixed drives present. I checked and double checked the IDE cable, the power cable and the jumper, all seem ok. The cable works fine b/c it was used on the 4gb drive that was in there previously. It's an ATA 100 cable, and this is the first ATA 100 drive being used on it, however. Nothing seems to be visibly wrong with the cable, no tears. Some bends, and kinks, but I've tried to fllatten them out as best as I can. I'm thinking to manually set enter the data in the bios, and see if it finds it. I've never done it before, so I wanted some ideas to see if there was anything else I could try.

Thanks

 

[|TOAST|]

I assume that since you're replacing a 4GB drive that this is an old system (ie: predates 10/98). If this is the case you should either be able to detect the drive and create up to and access up to 8GB (as per the limitation of BIOS's predating 10/98 I beleive but I could be wrong and that could be the answer for ABIT boards) or not detect it at all because it is too large for the outdated BIOS to understand.

Also try using the command option fdisk /mbr and see if it then recognizes it on reboot... although I suspect this will not work if the BIOS is not dtecting it at all (which sounds to be the case to me)... I dunno maybe I'm wrong. Just trying to help a bit.

 

[|TOAST|]

Oh and usually I found that outdated BIOS's that did detect only the first 8GB became unstable at some point during or soon after the OS installation. Also, see if you can download a virtual/dynamic type disk utility to run after installing OS to the first 8GB so as to access the rest of the drive's space. I believe this writes to teh sector zero (whihc fdisk /mbr will format and you do not want to use after installation of this utility) and creates a virtual BIOS so to speak for motherboards not supporting a new BIOS flash to fix this problem... See if there is a BIOS update to flash to fix this problem first.

 

[RayEarth]

did the ata 100 cable come with the drive or are you using an old one, perhaps try another ata-66/100 cable, does the motherboard support the ata-100 hard drives? is the motherboard using the latest bios? is the hard drive set to master and is it on a cable by itself connected to the primary ide connector or is it sharing the cable with another device? is the red line on the cable matching pin 1 on the hard drive and the motherboard ide connector? does the bios even detect the hard at startup? what does the bios tell you about your hard drive, is the info. the bios showing correct? did try to unplug every and just test the hard drive in the primary ide and the secondary ide by itself to make sure there was no confict? how about testing it in you system to see if it's the hard drive that's bad? ... i might be out of ideas...maybe....

 

[|TOAST|]

I believe the ATA 33 vs. 66/100 cable is not a problem at all since all drives with faster than ATA33 interface would have to be backwards compatible (for this demonstrated reason) by the standards set in teh white papers for ATA66/100.

 

[The Dancing Peacock]

damn, sorry...I forgot the specs for the computer. First thing I ask when troubleshooting. I even thought about it while I was writing the thread, but forgot by the end. It's an athlon xp 1600+
ecs k75sa, pc2100 from crucial... It's the master on the primary ide channel, no slave drive, the only other thing is the CDROM which is master on the secondary channel. On boot up, right after the memory test, it pauses on finding the Primary master. It finds "IDE Hard Disk", and does not output the name of the drive.

Thanks.

 

[RayEarth]

does it take awhile for the bios to detect the hdd when you choose auto detect? if so, the hdd may have a problem, normally if the hdd drive is good, the bios should instantly spit back the info when you choose auto detect, also you might want to load the bios default or load the optimized bios settings and they setup the bios to you liking, use this guide as help to setup the bios:
http://www.rojakpot.com/Speed_Demonz/BIOS_Guide/BIOS_Guide_Index.htm
Also you should try this hard drive on another system to see if that bios has a hard time finding as well, if so, then you know it will be the hard drive problem, to make sure, use the hard drive from the other system in your current system and if it can find the hard drive with no problems they you can be sure it's the new hard drive.

 

[SilentRunning]

OK, let me give a shot at this. Someone else just had a similar problem here.
You say the drive is the only drive on the primary channel and it is the master. The jumpers should not be set to the master setting but rather to neutral (or single drive) setting. If the jumper on the drive is set to master then the bios searches for the nonexistant slave drive and can slow down and interfer with the bios autodetect.

 

[The Dancing Peacock]

I went into the bios, and did autodetect in the drive settings. It found the drive. I also set it so that the bios knows there are no slave drives, but it does still take a while to come up. The drive doesn't have the single drive on it, it just shows cable select, slave and master. I'll go check out the wd website for more info, since it's a bare drive, with no manual...


Thanks.

 

[SilentRunning]

The jumper settings are here

Just removing the jumper sets it to single drive mode, but the neutral position let you store the jumper on the drive for future use.

 

[The Dancing Peacock]

yea, I had a wd instruction manual from my wd60bb that I bought a while ago. I didn't think about the jumper settings. I changed it to single drive, and it finds it instantaneous like it should. Thanks for all your help .


TDP