HDD not detected in bios.

[borat]

I'm resurectig an old amd K6-3 based PC thats been dormant for a couple of years for my dad.
It has a 13GB IBM hard drive in it which is pretty slow by todays standards. Luckily I have a slightly better Western digital WD400AB going spare so I plugged it in. Booted into windows on the old drive and the new 40gig was detected, I formatted it and then using ghost copied over the entire contents of the 13.5 gig drive, set the OS active for booting and copied the MBR over.

Now I turn the PC off and connect the WD400 up to the primary cable as the old drive was connected. I turn the PC on but it will not autodetect the new HDD. I have tried every jumper setting possible on the WD400 but still it will not detect it.

The drive works fine in windows when I boot the PC from the 13.5gig although strangely the bios does not detect it on the secondary master even in this case (but it still appears in windows).

Anyone have an idea whats going on? The motherboard is a ECS P5VP-A+ super socket 7 and when it tried to detect the wd400 on the primary ide it just hangs there indefinately.

[VJ]

Is the harddrive found in bios when booting from the 13.5 GB drive?

There are some capacities that can give problems on biosses, this one seems possible for you:
31.5 GB: http://www.storagereview.com/guide20...sizeGB315.html


Jörg

[az]

Drive jumpered correctly? Try leaving it at the connector you have it at when using the smaller drive as boot drive and just remove the smaller drive. Windows has no problem with this strange arrangement (I once booted from a secondary slave with no other drives installed).

[gt40]

the WD400 requires all jumpers removed when it is the only drive in the system.
Could be a faulty drive - I had one replaced by WD that exhibited the same symptoms.

[Technoid]

the WD400 requires all jumpers removed when it is the only drive in the system.
Could be a faulty drive - I had one replaced by WD that exhibited the same symptoms.

This WD behuvior almost drived me nuts (and bolts) once

[borat]

Drive is jumpered correctly (jumpers removed, and also tried them in the neutral position)
Sadly its also not detected in the bios when using it alongside the 13.5 gig, only in windows - I also have another identical drive and its got exactly the same problem. May be the old mobo in there, tried absolutely everything I can think of except I have an old PCI raid controller somwhere which I think can just do single channel IDE, Will dig that out and have a play.

[Wombat]

Did you install a software BIOS extension for larger drives?

[borat]

Running the latest bar 1 bios (2.2f), the final release of the bios for this includes something called a 'willit_2000 patch' could this be larger drive support?

http://www.ecsusa.com/downloads/p5vp_a.html

[SitFlyer]

I did a little searching and there is a BIOS 2.2h that has a fix for the 32GB harddisk limit and supports IDE drives up to 128GB

[VJ]

Funny, that 2.2h is also on the site Borat linked...


Jörg

[borat]

I had been thinking about flashing to that bios but kept telling myself 'your running the one prior to it, it definately won't mke any difference'.

Thanks for the help chaps, hopefully my next post today will be from the 40Gb drive!

[borat]

As I suspected the standard 2.2h bios did not support drives over 32Gb so I had to use a special patched version called 2.2h_J2! Now the bios detects the drive perfectly, The only problem I have is that I have ghosted the old 13G drive onto the new one, but now it does not boot from it. Gets past the bios screen fine, and goes to 'verifying pool DMI' and then just hangs forever. Any suggestions before I attempt a format and fresh install(really dont want to do this as its set up just as I want it right now)?

[Wombat]

Then the first thing to do is to manually reset the DMI pool - there should be an option in the BIOS, and you have nothing to lose by doing it (except that if things shuffle out differently then Windows may have a lot of re-detecting).

If not...
When did you do the ghosting? With this new BIOS? If not, the drive's geometry could appear very different, and you should ghost over it again.

[borat]

Ghost was done before then tried, then ghosted again after bios update, and retried but got the same problem. Would a CMOS reset do the trick? Not sure how to reset the DMI pool, it is a pretty basic bios by todays standards.

[Gurm]

Definitely ghost WITH the new BIOS. Additionally, sometimes you have to boot from a floppy and do an FDISK /MBR depending on which ghost program you used and its mood that day.