Seagate HD not detected by Dell BIOS

I have a Dell Inspiron 1720 with an Intel Express GM965, and a Western Digital Scorpio Blue 120Gb @5400rpm. I recently purchased a Seagate Momentus 7200.3 (320Gb) to upgrade my HD, but I can't manage to get the BIOS to detect my drive. I've already placed the jumper in the HD but no luck. I tried the HD on a friend's Toshiba with an Intel Express PM965 chipset and it recognized the HD just fine without the jumper... Any suggestions?

 

Look carefully in the BIOS at the IDE controllers. You may be able to open the drive's location, then it may say "autodetect drive ". If not, look through the other BIOS menus for a similar selection.

When you put the jumper on, what is the setting? Assuming you are connecting it to the same cable as the other HDD, check the jumper settings on the WD drive. There may be a setting "Master with slave ". If the WD is set to CS (Cable Select), the Seagate should also be set to CS. If that combination does not work, set the WD to Master and the Seagate to Slave. The cable needs to have 80 leads, not 40. The cable on the secondary IDE controller might only have 40 leads, if you are trying to connect it to that.

If you are stuck, go to the Seagate support website and look for installation instructions. You can get their utility Discwizard, that could point you to the cause.

Matt

 

Hi Matt,

The drives in question are 2.5" SATA, I'm guessing the jumper in question is the 137Gb capacity limit, though there is/are "factory use only" jumpers according to the Seagate Site.

PoloGG set the drive the way it was when you purchased it (your system should handle the 300+Gb's without problem). Follow MattG's advise regarding BIOS but ignore the Jumper settings etc.

You can get additional support for your drive here?

 

The laptop is a bit over a year old (purchased 11/2007)... I've already checked in Dell's support site and I have the latest BIOS version (A09). My laptop supports SATA drives since the WD (SATA) was included in the factory configuration.

 

Thanks for the corrections!

Also try here:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=85a34a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

Matt

 

I'm really sorry about the double thread, I'm new to posting in BBS and I wasn't aware it was inappropiate to post in several BBS. I finally got my laptop to detect my new HDD by tugging the interposer a bit to ensure a correct contact with the mobo HDD terminals. Thanks a lot to everyone who replied, and sorry again about the double posting.

 

PoloGG

About 2 hours ago I installed the same drive in my new Asus 1000HE netbook. Computer recognized, Acronis did all the heavy work, including resizing the partitions. Drive works great. Trimmed a minute (3 minutes - full image) off my image backups and programs load faster. You made a good choice in drives ... of course it would be nice if you could use it. Check to see if any BIOS updates released pertaining to HDD issues / recognizing.

UPDATE - Just reread your post, you have already verified current BIOS.
I'll keep an eye on this thread for any suggestions I could provide.

 

Dennis,

The problems been resolved, it was a connection issue... PoloGG confirms this in his last post.

It's always the simplest of problems that are most difficult to resolve online

 

Thanks for pointing out his fix. Now if I could fix my eye sight / reading skills that easy. Of course I could blame it on the 10" screen I'm viewing with.... or maybe the bad lighting ... yea that's the problem ... or maybe ...
Thanks wildfire, have a nice day.