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?? WD HDD not bootable, need to fix that ??

K

kazanjig

Member
I got the parts for my new system last night and began putting it together. No problem, before I knew it I was installing XP. Now, here's the issue: I didn't run the EZ utility that came with the WD HDD before starting my XP install, so it's not bootable. It copies all the XP files from the CD and then reboots to nothing. My BIOS says it can't find the primary master IDE drive (which the HDD is connected as). The drive was partitioned into four equal sizes by the XP installer, but I can't run fdisk to get rid of what I did since the BIOS doesn't know it's there.
How can I make this drive bootable now? I tried booting from my Win98 CD, and that works, but it still doesn't recognize the HDD.
Any help would be immensely appreciated.


kazanjig
 
I didn't get a chance to try that yet, but I did just find a little tidbit on the WD site.
This drive is single on the controller, and I wasn't aware that with Ultra ATA, if there is no slave drive, the drive should be set as Single not Master. So this may explain why my BIOS doesn't detect my drive.

Also, which would be better, FAT32 or NTFS?
 
Which hard drive is it and what mobo? I know some of the 80gb and under drives had a firmware identification problem when mixed with via chipsets, most infamously the Apollo 133, most specificly with the Abit KT7 and KT7a boards... there might be more... the solution for it was odly enough to take the IDE cable and cut the first two wires starting with pin one. If you want to verify that I'm not making this up, call WD. They'll give you the option of sending you a premade cut one, or walk you through how to do it.

I know it's probably not it, but the best I could do
 
It's a WD800BBRTL drive on a Asus P4S333 mobo.
Like I said above, I'm figuring it's because I have the drive set as Master and not Single. I checked out the WD tech support site and it said that if it's the only drive on the controller it needs to be Single. I hope that's the only problem. The XP installer recognized the drive properly and reported it's size correctly as well. I'm sure the only problem is that damn jumper.

Thanks for the help.
 
I hope it works out for you but it doesn't sound good to me. If the jumper was in the wrong position then it's very unlikely that your motherboard would have detected it. If this was the case, then the XP installer would never have had the opportunity to see the drive.
Also, I could be wrong, but I believe that the WD drives ship with the jumpers set for single drive.
Good luck!
 
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