VIA 266A vs. Western Digital Hard Drives

[MAS5]

Is there a concern out there with compatibility of the VIA 266A chipset and certain WD hard drives? I have a new system i am trying to build. Contents are
EPOX 8kha+
AMD XP1800
Western Digital 400bb Hard Drive
Gainward GeForce 2 Ti/500 Gold

I built the system and the bios will not recognize the hard drive. I tried another WD hard drive (a 20GB 7200 rpm drive that is about 2 years old) that is installed in my current system. It was recognized by the bios. I tried the 40GB drive in the older system and no luck, bios never saw it.

I called Western Digital and the TS guy said that there was an issue with the VIA chipset and this model of WD drives. He is sending me a new cable.

Is this guy out to lunch? I can't find any docs out there that let anyone know there is a problem with this drive and chipset compatability.

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Tanner]

do you have the latest VIA drivers and stuff for your mobo? is that the chipaset U have?

 

[Mattster]

It wouldn't be a chipset driver issue, as the BIOS will not even pick up the drive when the machine is powered on.

Do you have the latest BIOS flash on the board?

8khi2304.exe is the latest BIOS on the Epox site, with a date of 3/2/2002. Here is what it fixes:

- Turn off Keyboard LED after ACPI S3/S4/S5 modes.
- Fixed ability to modify DRAM Bank when overclocked.
- Added support for hard drives up to 137GB.
- Added CPU support for forthcoming AMD processors.
- Added support for ATA-133 hard drives. *

* - ATA-133 clarification: This does not add ability to use ATA-133 modes for hard drives. It allows the BIOS identify ATA-133 drives as being attached. Actual drive transfer modes limited by IDE controller (max ATA-100).

This might help the problem. Never hurts to try it.....

HTH!
Matt

 

[Buz2b]

The TS guy is out to lunch. If it was the chipset then why send a cable? Silly questions but I must ask: did you try a boot disk and then run FDISK to see if the drive could be located? You should be able to run that with both drives (old one in primary position) hooked up and choose the option to switch drives. I think that is option #5. If you don't have the option then it is indeed not "seeing" it. Did you try a different cable to see if that was the problem?
Also, as Mattster said, flash the BIOS, just for giggles.