No H/D's in bios

Hi I am new to this so please be gentle. I recently bought an 80gb Seagate Baracuda to replace my 8gb Maxtor(which holds my o/s win xp Sp2 pro. So obviosly I needed to put the Baracuda as primary slave to the primary master(maxtor) both on the main IDE channel, so that I can Acronis over the contents of the Maxtor C drive. When this happened on boot up the bios could not detect either H/D. If I unconnect the Baracuda everything runs fine. If I try to install a new operating system XP SP2 nothing happens at all. Now the interesting thing is when I first installed the Baracuda it was recognised in the bios but not in manager, and the computer was really slow it would take like 10mins for xp to load. That was why I pulled it out and now when i put it back in no H/dd's are recognised.

Mindplayer45

 

You are going from an 8Gb drive to an 80Gb. 8Gb were standard in about 1998/9, so I would suppose that the motherboard was around that age as well. The drive is probably too large for the BIOS to see (known as the BIOS limitation).

Get the Seagate DiskWizard utilities from the Seagate Website (get the Seatools utilities while you're there). If DiskWizard sees the drive OK, you will have three possible options. 1) Flash the BIOS of the motherboard, depending on whether the motherboard manufacturer has made BIOS upgrades that will allow larger drives to be recognized (you may be lucky, but from that period they may only go to around 20-40Gb). 2) See if there is a jumper on the drive to limit it's capacity. I have used them that way until I upgrade the motherboard, then use the full capacity. 3) Use a Dynamic Drive Overlay, these fool the BIOS into seeing the drive as it's real size. The problem with them is that as soon as you change the configuration of the HDDs, your drive "disappears" (again), you may or may not lose your data depending on if you can fix the DDO. I think DiskWizard has the Ontack DDO.

Try to avoid using a DDO if possible. If you flash the BIOS, read the instructions carefully and make certain that the motherboard model is correct. If there is a limiting jumper on the drive and it works, use that till you upgrade the motherboard/computer.

Matt

 

Hi Mattman, I forgot to mention that I have been running a W/D 80gb as an E drive(slave) for a while with no problems. I took this out to try and team the 8gb with with the Baracuda so the baracuda can become the C drive. Since my first post I slaved the Baracuda and mastered it to the cd drive, same thing happened, bios could not see either drive. But no problems with C and E. I tried Diskwizard and starter edition but still no go. It would appear to me that the disk is dead. The motherboard is a P4S133 and not that old the Maxtor is about 1999. I put that in because my old 6gb Fujitsu was way too small and now so is the Maxtor.
Thanks
mindplayer45

 

If you were to jumper it as master on the primary IDE (boot drive location), without any other drives connected and DiskWizard or Seatools still could not see it, then yes, I would agree it is not working. When you return it, let them know that you tested it with the Seagate utilities.

I might think about testing it in another computer, but I would not expect any difference.

Oh well, that the way it goes sometimes. Maybe it was was dropped during shipment

Matt