Setup doesn't see my 160g HDD [Clicks on boot - diagnostics fail]

I'll make this brief because my last attempt to post didn't work.

I have a new WD Cavier 160 g hdd. My BIOS and mobo support it. When I try to install Windows XP Home Ed with SP2, I keep getting 8057 MB Disk 0 at ID 0 on bus 0 on atapi. Setup cannot access this disk.

According to my mobo tech, I don't need an ultra 133 card, or to flash BIOS. So what do I do to get XP setup to see this drive?

 

Just a thought, but if you have two hard drives in the computer and the 8gig is primary master and does not have any free space on it, or a FAT or NTFS primary partition, then XP setup won’t be able to install to the 160gig as it needs to put the boot files on the 8gig.

 

Sorry, I should have specified. The WD Caviar 160g drive is PATA. It is the only drive at the top of the chain on the Primary IDE. The only other devices are a Sony CD/RW at top of IDE 2, and a single Floppy drive. Communication is working properly for both the CD/RW and the Floppy. It's just the HDD that is problematical.

As for jumpers. I've tried both CD/RW and HDD set to Cable Select and then no jumpers indicating single drive on the cable. 80 wire IDE flat cables are in use. Blue to system and drives at top.

BIOS reads this HDD as 100,40035 MB LBA WD ROM Model Saber 05.01C05
CD/RW Secondary is read as CDRW ATA 33

BIOS is AwardBIOS 12-2005

I have swapped out IDE cables for the HDD. I have turned-on SATA in the BIOS (default) and turned it off.

During boot this HDD makes clicking noises. When access is attempted by one of Western Digital tools the drive clicks and the software chokes.

I've tried installing an Ultra 133 card known to work on another machine. It doesn't make a difference the HDD clicks and the BIOS searches the CD/RW for boot.

Thanks for the thoughts so far. Keep 'em comming.

 

Are you sure you got this correct as it’s saying you have a 10 thousand gig hard drive? A 160gig drive should be around 153,000 MB

The XP CD is reading it as an 8gig drive, which would suggest a bios problem.

Apart from double checking the bios and jumper settings, the only other suggestion I can give is to try completely wiping the hard drive of all data, in case something has completely messed up the partition table. The Western Digital tools can sometime install a Dynamic Drive Overlay to the Master Boot Record of hard drives which could be conflicting with your bios. Did you use a WD tool to partition and format the drive?

Killdisk or similar will do the job, either from floppy or CD. With a 160gig drive it will take a good few hours to do. Maybe slightly quicker from CD.

This bootable CD has killdisk included and many more useful tools. www.ultimatebootcd.com