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Thread ID: 41205 2004-01-02 23:50:00 Computer not recognising hdd Colm (5068) Press F1
Post ID Timestamp Content User
204995 2004-01-03 01:09:00 that is my motherboard with an award bios v6.0

to make things perfectly clear, I have tried installing only my new western digital 80gb hdd with jumper set to master, and When the computer starts up and shows all the different IDE drives, it comes up with

none
none
CDRW drive etc.
none

my assumption is that it should be

WD800 etc.
none
CDRW drive etc.
none

as it comes up on an alternative computer.
Colm (5068)
204996 2004-01-03 01:28:00 While it is connected. Go into BIOS and on the screen that lists drives, scroll down to "primary master" and hit the ENTER key. Does it list the drive ,heads,sectors, etc..? Pheonix (280)
204997 2004-01-03 03:49:00 Firstly I'd like to thank everyone who's taken the time to read this post, and a special thankyou to those that have replied to it.

after mucking around quite a bit, I've found that
It doesn't detect the hdd when I first turn on the computer
If I go into the bios and change access mode for the hdd to Large or LBA, and then select automatically detect hdd settings, it thinks for a while, restarts the computer, recognises my 80GB hdd as an 8.4 GB hdd: "WD1200BB17.07W" where it should be an
80GB hdd: "WDC 800BB-75DKAO 77.07W77" - or at least that's what the hdd shows up as on my alternative PC.

When this happens it comes up with "CMOS checksum error loaded defaults"
"Press f1 to continue or del to enter setup"
- and phoenix when this happened it came up with capacity 8,544MB, and listed the number of heads sectors etc. but the rest of the time these values were all 0.

I had a look in my motherboard manual, and it mentioned that CMOS checksum errors often occur when the CMOS battery goes flat, but I think this checksum error may have been caused by making changes to the settings and then causing the computer to restart.

After reading the motherboard manual, and using f6 to set the hdd BIOS settings to "Fail-safe default" and doing a few other things on the screen I have been unable to replicate the above described misdetection of my hdd. My computer can no longer recoginse it at all. But it does take ages detecting the IDE Drives. It ponders a while before deciding my 80gb hdd is not there.

So where should I go from here?
Should I upgrade the BIOS? (although my BIOS has both Lagre and LBA access types the manual says that upgrading the bios may be necessary for compatibility).
Should I replace the battery? (the BIOS changes I make when saving and exiting are consistantly present so I think the battery is still good).
Are there some BIOS settings I can change that I don't know about?
Should I return the HDD and try another model?
Colm (5068)
204998 2004-01-03 05:52:00 have you tried setting the hdd to 'cable select' cause some sysetms seem to prefer this........ drcspy (146)
204999 2004-01-03 10:15:00 Hi Colm
I'm with flashing your BIOS, But as mentioned earlier this can scary, and may mean, if things go wrong your pc will not even boot up.

Flash BIOS
BIOS if I remember correctly is EPROM chip (electrically programmed) reprogramming these chips can often be done by downloading a update from the BIOS Manufacturer site. The ones I have done (laptop and pc) have involved downloading the upgrade, Installing onto floppy and the booting the pc to be upgraded from that floppy, then it was just a matter of following the prompts or one case watching while saying a prey.

I must emphise THINGS CAN GO HORRIBLY WRONG when flashing a BIOS
beama (111)
205000 2004-01-03 10:15:00 yes Colm (5068)
205001 2004-01-03 10:53:00 Colm, I would suggest you to check the jumper setting of the WD HDD. Setting it to Master may not be correct if it is the only HDD. Take a good look at the label and make sure that the jumper is set correctly.

From memory (I maybe wrong), I think if it is the only HDD no jumper is necessary. Anyway, it should be indicated on the label of the HDD.
bk T (215)
205002 2004-01-03 10:57:00 flashing BIOS is not as bad as some people are making it sound.

as with all computer tinkering, care must be taken to do things right.

be very sure that you have the right BIOS upgrade for YOUR mother board not just one that a bit like it.....

the process only takes five minutes.

make sure that no people in the house are going to turn off the power during the flash and such like.....

as long as you follow the instructions and pray to the god of your choice.........


good luck :-)
robsonde (120)
205003 2004-01-03 19:03:00 I have the same hard drive, and found that it would not work on Master. It had to be set to "Single' drive for it to work, when it was the only drive on the cable. somebody (208)
205004 2004-01-03 22:30:00 Interesting, thankyou.

As I am trying to actually setup two hdds (origonal = master, new = slave) I will probably procrastinate flashing the bios for a couple of hours...

Hopefully my MB will be a bit more useful than a fishing weight when I'm done
Colm (5068)
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